So, Assassinâs Creed Odyssey has this new thing, where you can âromanceâ whoever you want. In the latest DLC, one playable character, Kassandra, has a baby.
People are upset about this.
Why? Itâs completely understandable. Since you can âromanceâ (okay I hate that word and this essay is about that) anyone you want, you can play Kassandra as a lesbian. In fact, in my playtime, I donât actually think Iâve come across a single straight romance option. So maybe thatâs what youâre supposed to do canonically. But apparently in the DLC, Kassandra is framed as bi, not lesbian, and some people arenât happy about that.
So, after about 3 hours of sleep this morning, I saw a tweet, and the tweet said, âUbisoft sorry for shock Assassinâs Creed Odyssey DLC twist which ignores player choice.â
Now, that specific sentence stuck out to me, because itâs something Iâve seen before, and I think thereâs an interesting discussion to be had there. I wasnât focused on the Kassandra issue specifically so much as I was the idea of âwhen should player choice matter?â
Me being me, I replied to this with my belief that most of the time, player choice isnât worth respecting. Now, in my thread, I got to the point, but it took me a bit because I did the me thing and worked through the logical build up to my point, because I like establishing a need and then going âso thatâs why we need X,â this time, letâs get the point out up front, then work backwards. Not my preferred way to go, but itâs more important to make sense than to be comfortable.
My feeling is, I might be saying something useful, but if Iâm not thoughtful about how I say things, people might end up misunderstanding. Since the thing that inspired this thought process was Eurogamer discussing ârespecting player choice,â but that choice was about sexuality, it can too easily come across as saying âplayer sexuality shouldnât be respected.â And thatâs obvious horse shit; player sexuality must always be respected, because thatâs an innate quality of the self! You should never shit on identity. But... should âplayer choice,â as a generalized topic, actually be respected?
So, hereâs the thesis: I think the way we talk about player choice is wrong. I think that when players are expressing themselves in terms of appearance, race, gender, sexuality, or whatever other personal trait, we should be supportive of their ability to play the way they want. Ubisoft giving players the opportunity to play as a lesbian character and then, in an expansion, saying âactually you canât be a lesbianâ is a problem. But this doesnât mean that we should cater to every player choice, and Eurogamerâs specific framing is what bothered me, because I think player choice doesnât deserve the sanctity that itâs often given.
I think, in some games, players want to be gods, and I think this is something that encourages us to think about the world in an unhealthy way.
Take Dragon Age 2, for instance. In that game, thereâs a character named Aveline. Every single romance option in Dragon Age 2 sucks. Aveline is the only good companion character in the entire game... but you cannot âromanceâ her. I think sheâs the only person you arenât related to that you canât woo.
I hate using âromanceâ as a verb. I hate the idea that you can âromanceâ anyone you see in a game, because thatâs not how it works in real life. If I walk up to you and flirt terribly, and you happen to not be into me, you have the ability to turn me down and not enter into a relationship with me, right?
So you cannot âromanceâ Aveline, which really just means âinteracting with her enough that her fuck meter hits max and then you are rewarded with a terrible cutscene of your lifeless dolls dry humping each other and then she stands in your house near your bed and you can interact with her.â I hate elves, so I did everything I could to piss another character, Merill, off, but apparently maxing out your hate means sheâll move into your house and hatefuck you.
Itâs so fucking gross to treat sex, in games, as a weird fucking carnival game where sex is the prize. Donât do any of the actual work of a relationship, just, yâknow, max out a meter and youâre owed sex by your subordinates. You can see how thatâs⌠a bit troubling, right?
Now, I could level this criticism at Assassinâs Creed Odyssey. But, hey, this isnât an essay about how bad Assassinâs Creed Odyssey is at relationships. I mean, it is, because âAssassinâs Creed Odyssey being so bad at relationships they literally invalidate player choice and itâs understandably upsetting peopleâ is the thing that got this started, but what Iâm specifically interested in is the way Eurogamer (intentionally or unintentionally) suggested that games need to respect player choice.
I think player choice only needs to be respected when it comes to expression.
Iâm making a game where you are a specific person, with specific goals and beliefs. You cannot determine his appearance, gender, or sexuality. This game is a game about seeing the world through his eyes. So, if you play that game, youâre going to invariably be that guy. I like games like this. I like playing Cate Archer in No One Lives Forever. I like being in someone elseâs shoes.
But then thereâs a whole mess of games where you can more or less act how you want. You can pick what your character looks and acts like, how they perceive the world, and all sorts of other things. You can be yourself in the game world, or, heck, you can be someone you came up with. Itâs all good.
Thatâs really cool! Being able to customize that experience is really awesome. In an earlier essay, I discussed how âbeing able to visit another worldâ is a huge part of why I care about games. Therefore, being able to be myself in that other world (or whoever I want to be) is super important.
But I think people conflate âbeing who you wantâ and âengaging with the world on your termsâ and I donât think they should do that.
Like I said, I personally care about going to other worlds. Implicit in this is the understanding that for a world to be⌠believable? For it to exist, or whatever you want to call it, the world has to have its own terms that do not revolve around me.
Take Thief, for instance. Thief is an immersive simâa genre thatâs about existing in another worldâbased around the idea of being a thief. One of the reasons that Thief is compelling is that⌠well, youâre a thief, not a warrior, so if you get into a sword fight with one guy, you might lose. If you get into a sword fight with multiple guys, you will most definitely lose. You cannot dictate that all outcomes will be favorable to you regardless of the choices you make.
Thief works because you can make choices that lead to unfavorable outcomes. If you could choose anything and have it work out in your favor every time, the fantasy of being a thief would collapse, and Thief would fail as an immersive sim.
I believe that immersive sims are games that represent worlds. For a world to be realistic, there must be scenarios in which you can make suboptimal decisionsâeven wrong ones. When people argue that games should always result in a favorable outcome that ârespects their decisions,â these people want playgrounds, not immersive games. An immersive game is one that exists regardless of the player, not for the player.
You could say Iâm establishing that there are two kinds of games. For the sake of argument, letâs call them playgrounds and simulations.
Neither one is valid, but I think a great deal of people assume all games should be playgrounds and unfairly judge games that donât allow them to treat all games like a playground. I think immersive simsâor any game trying to let players exist in a worldâare necessarily player agnostic. I think these games should acknowledge your decisions but that doesnât mean respecting them. Sure, you built a character for stealth, but the guy youâre going up against was characterized as paranoid and has cameras everywhere; maybe that level is impossible to stealth. The game isnât bad because it doesnât let you play according to your build, itâs giving you a believable, interesting world.
Now, maybe you just want Ultimate Stealth Game Playground, in which case, Iâd like to introduce you to Ghost Recon: Wildlands, a wonderful game Iâve put 48 hours into. That is a playground, and itâs a really good one.
I think we should respect choices when theyâre about players defining themselves in games that are built around players defining themselves, like Assassinâs Creed Odyssey, a game that was heavily marketed as letting you choose your sexuality. I donât think we need to respect every single player choice because I donât think the player should have their every whim catered to.
I feel like a lot of this ties into the idea of âpower fantasy.â I think power fantasies can be great. Sometimes itâs fun to go all Hulk: Ultimate Destruction on a city and smash things, you know? But I feel that a lot of people⌠man, I feel like a lot of people want the game to constantly tell them how amazing they are and do anything they want and sometimes that leads to shitty scenarios where players are like âeveryone should fuck me if I want them to.â I think thatâs gross.
A world cannot be authentic if it can only respond positively to the playerâs interactions.
If a playerâs agency is absolute, then no other character has any agency, and you cannot meaningfully engage with those characters. They exist to please you and nothing else. You cannot engage with the game and treat them as equal to you; you can only see them as part of a facade. The game world cannot be believable or interesting.
A lot of bad shooters I see tend to be designed in the same way: they exist to fellate the player. Theyâre not satisfying because you canât make wrong decisions; you canât mess up. As a result, thereâs no danger. Because the games are so interested in making you feel powerful and strong and good about yourself, you never feel like you earned anything. Your relationship to the world ends up turning you into that creepy kid from the Twilight Zone episode where a creepy kid has godlike powers and can make anyone do anything he wants them to or be whatever he wants.
Thatâs not an interesting relationship to the experience. Itâs not really one I want to have.
So. Yeah. You should be able to define your character. Thatâs good. You should not be able to determine how the world responds to you, though.
The Ubisoft situation really only refers to the former: you should be able to define your character, and they chose not to respect that. They fucked up. But I feel like a lot of people are using this as a springboard to say that all decisions no matter what should be respected, whereas I think only certain ones (like the decision to define Kassandraâs sexuality) should be respected. I think there are plenty of decisions that should not. I think games are interesting when theyâre somewhat player agnostic.
I think you should be who you want, in games that present that opportunity, and I think Ubisoft fucked up by retroactively invalidating choice.
Iâm just... feeling like Iâm seeing people around this discussion arguing that all games should allow all decisions all the time, the playerâs position within games is sacred, games should never ever under any circumstances present players with bad choices, and Iâm uncomfortable with that âcause I think it leads to weird situations like the one with âAveline owes me sex in Dragon Age 2 because I want to have it with herâ which is weird and gross.
Nobody makes third person shooters like Remedy. Over the past fifteen years, they have released some of the most interesting and unique video games ever created. This legendary Finnish studio got me interested in game design with the first two Max Payne games, convinced me to buy my first console with Alan Wake, and theyâve been influencing my understanding of game design ever since. What makes Remedy such an inimitable force in the video game industry? Well, thatâs what weâre here to discuss.
Since this is a video about a particular studioâs game design, letâs talk about game design first. Put simply, game design is the art of creating and solving problems. The designer first creates a set of rules that defines a playerâs activities, and then comes up with a reason to perform those activities. What follows that is a process of iteration and refinement designed to create structured play.
Most internet game discussion is limited to this idea of a game being either good or bad, but weâre here to talk about game design, which means that weâre not here to say whether something is good or not. Discussing problem solving can have the unintended effect of making something relatively minor look like a big point of contention, and I think thatâs important to keep in mind in any game design discussion. Weâre here to look at problems and solutions, and, hopefully, learn from them.
Remedyâs first third person shooter, Max Payne, debuted in 2001, and it launches with what were, for the time, near-perfect shooter controls. Even Grand Theft Auto III, a game that released just a few months later, couldnât hold a candle to Max Payne. The gameâs controls were as smooth as butter. The weapon selection was top notch. The story was an enthralling tale about a detective on the run, framed for a murder he didnât commit. And, most importantly of all, Max Payneâs unique bullet time mechanic was more than just a gimmick; it was core to playing the game well.
What makes Max Payne truly unique, especially for the time it released, is that itâs a game that blends its story with the mood. The gameplay accurately reflects the atmosphere of the narrative. Prior to 2001, not many games had actually managed to pull that off; with Max Payneâs bullet time mechanic, where a player can slow down time at the press of a button, everything changed.
Max Payne creates tension through its bullet time mechanic; before it, getting hit was all part of the job. Shrug bullets off and look for health kits. With bullet time, you now have the power to avoid getting hit, which means you also have to start thinking about whether or not bullets can actually touch you. Each bullet carries much more weight than a bullet in another game, because you, the player, are thinking âwell, I couldâve dodged that if only Iâd been a bit better at the game.â
This mechanic draws you into Maxâs headspace; youâre thinking more about getting hit than simply shrugging off bullets. Gunfights suddenly have drastically increased stakes.
They also look super cool, and looking cool is important to helping the player feel cool. Youâd be surprised at how many games with weak core gameplay can get away with seeming like great games just because they look nice.
Whatâs great about Max Payne is that itâs more than just a game with a cool looking mechanic. The core shooting is pretty great too!
Every shooter is built of the same three basic components: motion, action, and reaction. At its basic, foundational level, both first and third person shooters are about a camera being navigated through a three dimensional space; if you want a shooter to be good, then it needs a solid foundation; having interesting, moment-to-moment movement is vital.
Consider a bad shooter, where you spend most of your time sitting still, popping out of cover only to shoot at an enemy for a few seconds. This kind of combat is rarely interesting because thereâs very little to stimulate the player aside from pointing a gun. Remedy is one of the few third person shooter studios to ever really understand this, and it shows in their game design.
Max Payneâs level design pushes player to engage in lateral movement; when coupled with the bullet dodge mechanic, players start thinking all sorts of things, like whether theyâll get hit when dodging, whether thereâs anything to block them in the dodge, how this gives them an advantage over their enemies, and so on and so forth. The combat space gets a lot more engaging because the player now has to consider it beyond simply âwhen will the next guy pop out of cover?â Lateral and vertical motion tends to inspire player thought more than forward motion, because the player has less information on the periphery, which means that they have more questions to answer, which means the game is more mentally stimulating, keeping players engaged.
Another way to do this is by limiting player visual information. Sure, you can have a game with a bunch of waist-high cover, but if the player can see the entire arena at all times, they have a lot of visual information; if players have to contend with cover they canât see over, theyâre faced with a reduction in information that keeps them moving laterally; Max Payne does a nice job limiting player information through its geometry.
Level design isnât the only way to make movement feel good. Another important element is responsiveness; great animations look nice, but itâs more important that a game feels nice, and you do this by prioritizing input over animation, which Remedy does. We tend to move instinctively in real life; when a game character is too busy playing animations to feel like theyâre moving instinctively, players get frustrated, especially in shooters. Having near-instant response to input is way more satisfying than having nice but unresponsive animations for it.
Thereâs a lot of little presentation things you can do to help your shooter feel better, but at the basic, core level, simply encouraging thoughtful player movement and making it responsive is a great start, and thatâs what Max Payne excelled at.
Once youâve nailed movement, the way Remedy has, youâve got to start thinking about the actions the player will take. Max Payne was good, but Remedy knew they could improve on it, and they did, with the brilliant Max Payne 2.
Most player action in a shooter is about the act of shooting itself; if your guns look and sound nice, youâve already won half the battle. Give them a nice, aggressive sound and make âem look flashy, and youâre halfway to pleasing the audience. The next step is to make weapons interesting, but this is harder to do when everythingâs inspired by real life; you canât make a gun that shoots a land-swimming shark when youâre trying to use real-world weapons. Remedy does some really interesting stuff with player action, but before we get too into that, letâs talk about reaction.
Reaction is where Max Payne 2 really shines. It was one of the first games to really show off the Havok physics middleware; when you shoot enemies in Max Payne 2 they go flying in these delightful ragdolls animations that are fun to watch, even to this day. Guns suddenly feel a lot more impactful than they did in Max Payne, and the combat overall becomes way more interesting.
This is the first law of shooter feedback: for every player action, there must be an immediate and awesome reaction.
There are, of course, other, ways of communicating information to the player than a ragdoll death animation; Remedyâs games always highlight the last enemy kill in a room, so itâs always clear to players that itâs time to move on. The Gears of War series accomplishes a similar effect with an unmistakable musical sting that plays whenever combat finishes.
Reaction is a means of communication, and we players love communication, but only when itâs indirect. A man who says âah, you have killed meâ is not as exciting or immediately understandable as a man who shrieks as a shotgun propels him across the room and into a stack of boxes. Communication in an action game should be quick, direct, and unspoken, and Max Payne 2 remains one of the greatest communicators in gaming history.
What happened next was one of the worst things a Remedy fan could hope for. The two year turnaround between the Max Payne games is pretty standard, but waiting seven years for the next installment? Pure torture.
What we got was Alan Wake, a game I consider an all-time classic. Like Max Payne, it starts with a powerful motive. So much of game design is about motivating players to take action. Max Payne was a clear âIâve been framed and need to clear my nameâ story. Max Payne 2 built off that with some great character relationships and a sense of mystery. Alan Wake emphasized guilt.
A lot of games do the whole âthey kidnapped my significant other and I have to get them backâ thing, but they fail because the audience doesnât know the significant other, so they donât care nearly as much as the protagonist does. This story failing is called âassumed empathy.â Audiences are inherently skeptical; you canât just tell someone âyou care for this person because of a relationship you donât feel.â It wonât work. Alan Wake wisely avoids this problem by making the player character a jerk to his wife, Alice, while spending time showing that she truly cares for him. Alan wants to rescue Alice, not just because sheâs his wife, but because itâs his fault. The player can connect with that much easier. Theyâve been the jerk. They want to make things right.
As great as Alan Wake is, it did suffer from some common criticisms. Some people mistakenly believed that the shift to a linear design was thanks to console limitations, but the 360 was more than capable of rendering Alan Wakeâs massive world--in fact, I remember reading a technical article at the time that said that the game was actually rendering huge amounts of stuff it could have culled. Remedy explained that theyâd done it because it made more sense for the story they wanted to tell, but some people still hold on to the mistaken idea that the game was gimped for consoles. In this case, the fans were wrong.
However, another, deeper criticism popped up, and this one had a point: the combat seems to repetitive.
This is where we start talking about combat again.
First off, Alan Wake has incredible shooter combat. The problem is that the encounter design was weak.
There are two major components of encounter design. The first is visual variety, and the second is situational variety. Visual variety is just changing the way a place looks to make it feel varied, and itâs often the only thing a developer needs to satisfy the audience. You can have the greatest, most varied combat in the world, but if your maps are all just a bunch of grey cubes, players are going to claim that itâs repetitive. Theyâre wrong, but they donât feel wrong; the human brain is tricky that way.
Some developers have solved this by simply changing the environments or time of day. A lot of classic platformers had themed locations, like a cave full of lava or a lush jungle; newer games have taken different approaches. Gears of War 4 changes up the time of day and density of manmade structures in addition to its environments; the game feels more naturalistic than older games.
Alan Wake, being set in the rural northwest, had a huge variety of encounters--fights through a town, industrial areas, a dam, a forestry museum, and farms--but these encounters had a tendency to be broken up by gameplay set in a forest, which is an entirely logical thing to do, but some people got tired of the forests⌠or so they said.
See, I have this theory, which is that people werenât so much upset by the forests as they were the lack of situational variety. Alan Wake has a lot of memorable encounters--the creepy first encounter in the lumberyard, the desperate push through an abandoned mining village, the rock concert. Even the forests themselves were often distinct encounter; finding the crashed seaplane in one forest isnât quite the same as dashing through the woods while a crazed FBI agent shoots at you, or driving through the woods during the day on your way to meet a kidnapper.
But the forests themselves often provided the least amount of mechanical variety. The rock show sequence involves running around on a stage, blasting music while using pyrotechnics to keep monsters at bay. Exploring the town at night is one of the few times when youâre playing alongside other characters; when youâre in the forest, youâre usually alone. The slower exploration sequences are rarely criticized because thereâs so much detail and enjoyable Remedy writing to find there.
In the forests, itâs often just you, some unique geometry, and one specific ruleset.
Games like Gears and Halo are built on having one specific ruleset, but these games feature a wide variety of enemy and weapons, creating distinct permutations in each combat space. Bungieâs Halo has grunts, jackals, elites, and hunters, then adds several more enemies and variations of enemies as the game goes on, adding new species and enemy types with each installment. By Gears of War 3, the Gears series featured around 35 enemies with distinct tactics and abilities. In both of these games, the enemy sandbox is huge, especially compared to Remedyâs.
With the Max Payne games, players essentially had to face down goons equipped with different guns. Encounter variety and the rock-solid shooting mechanics kept things fun, but the games wouldâve benefited from a little variety. Alan Wake adds a few more enemy types, but not enough to last the duration of the game; players face off against small dudes who throw things, slightly bigger dudes, even bigger dudes who get angry, and some dudes who move really fast. Sometimes, players face off against vehicles that attack like angry bulls or floating object that act like⌠angry bulls with six dimensions of freedom.
To compound the problem, Alan Wake introduces a great-but-flawed mechanic.
See, Alan, the protagonist, has to face the darkness, and what better way to fight it than with light? Point a flashlight at an enemy, strip the darkness protecting him, and then you can kill him. This mechanic is great because light slows down an enemyâs advance; you have to shine your light on all the enemies to make them vulnerable, but you canât focus on any one enemy for too long, or the rest will gang up on you. This introduces a brilliant sense of tension and amps up the need for situational awareness, keeping players engaged with the combat.
Problem is, this combat rarely plays out in a unique or surprising way; I find it great fun because of the tension, but the lack of enemy variety means that encounters, especially those in the forest without unique things to make them interesting, rarely seem all that memorable. Players simply arenât required to change up how they play enough for things to be stimulating. The moment to moment gameplay can be fun, but the encounter to encounter gameplay can feel predictable, which leads audiences to start describing the game as ârepetitive,â even when all the encounters are unique; the tactics havenât changed enough to feel fresh.
Alan Wake is, in other words, a flawed but brilliant game. Itâs got some amazing encounters that change up the rules, but an unfortunate number of encounters that donât thanks to the limited pool of AI opponents to pick from. The combat is incredible; enemies ragdoll or explode as wonderfully, if not moreso than in Max Payne. The enemy management is great, but thereâs too much of it to allow for the snappy immediacy of Max Payne 2.
You end up with this game thatâs pleasing for some players and offputting to others. I love Alan Wake; I know so much of that game like Iâve lived in its world my whole life.
Two years later, Remedy addressed some of these problems with Alan Wakeâs American Nightmare. A new enemy type would split into multiple enemies whenever it was exposed to light too long; in other words, you had to manage the enemy by killing it by aiming at it sporadically, rather than focusing on it for long. Remedy added another enemy without a darkness shield; this one could turn into a flock of crows to fly away, adding some much needed verticality to the combat.
American Nightmare was a small, downloadable game set in a neat little open world sandbox; the encounter variety wasnât as tight as a result, but the game itself was fun as heck, and the combat improvements brought it a long way. As far as the mechanics went, Remedy had made their best game ever.
Jump forward in time, four years.
Letâs say you have a great third person shooter. Youâve nailed movement. Youâve got great combat thanks to good enemy variety and weapons. Youâve got great feedback because the game responds to essentially every player action.
What then?
Remedyâs answer was Quantum Break, and⌠as much as I enjoyed it, I felt like Remedy lost something along the way.
On paper, Quantum Break might be Remedyâs most interesting game yet; the player has more powers than theyâve ever had before, and the powers, in theory, introduce some much-needed combat variety. Not only that, but the world itself can change, greatly altering the way the player treats the combat space.
Unfortunately, Quantum Break has⌠well, a lot of problems. Right away, thereâs an issue with the protagonist, who is⌠some guy. Sorry, I actually have no idea who he is. I mean that. Itâs a guy who goes âmy best friend wanted me to drop by, so I did.â Max Payne is a cop whose wife and child died in a tragic accident. Alan Wake is a writer suffering from writerâs block whoâs been tricked into seeing a doctor by his caring wife. Jack is⌠a⌠guy. He doesnât even have a cool name related to the game. I have no idea about his past other than that he seems distant from his brother and friendly with a guy who is apparently his friend.
Then a lab accident happens, his friend becomes evil because of time travel and fears about the end of time itself, and Jack gets superpowers, but his brother dies, and⌠then time travel shenanigans ensue as Jack tries to stop time from dying? I beat the game a couple months ago, and I canât remember if time actually dies or not. Literally have no idea what happened there.
Itâs the first time I ever felt a Remedy story was forgettable. I donât know who the characters are, Â I certainly donât care about them, the stakes are âtime is breakingâ which I donât really understand? Like, what is there for me to care about here? Iâve got nothing.
But letâs say we do care about Jack and his plight. Now we have a game that⌠personally, I really struggled to get into. Most of the encounters seem even less creative than the previous ones. The game doles out new enemies one at a time, but they follow the modern cliche of soldier dude, shotgun dude with armor, sniper dude with a cloak, heavy dude with a light machine gun. Later, you fight some dudes who sometimes move really fast, and some tanky dudes, but thatâs about it.
The enemies stop being interesting pretty early on and theyâre rarely surprising. Remedyâs always had some issues with variety, but the encounters made up for it; Quantum Breakâs encounters rarely stand out for me. Itâs just the same guys in different rooms. The visual variety is great, and Quantum Break might just be the best-looking game of 2016, on my PC, especially when itâs pulling off its breathtaking environmental time twisting.
Worse still, the controls seem less precise. Iâm not sure what happened here. Alan Wake wasnât that great at jumping either; what happened to the studio that gave us the precision of the Max Payne games? The emphasis on animation priority killed me more than once in Quantum Break.
Do I sound like Iâm complaining? Iâm sorry.
I genuinely love Remedyâs trademark detailed worlds; theyâve always had this cool sense of âif you think you ought to be able to interact with it, you can,â and thatâs just as true here. Thereâs so much stuff to find in the world. The detail is breathtaking. The game is gorgeous. The architecture is, without a doubt, the best Iâve personally encountered in a game. As presentation goes, Quantum Break is the best of the best.
But⌠when Iâm fighting the same guys over and over as a guy whose plight I donât really care about, itâs hard to get attached. The movement mechanics are cool, especially then they flow together, but sometimes they donât flow together at all. Most of my deaths felt like they were because my character was made out of soggy tissue paper; Max and Alan felt far tougher than this. In fact, I never felt as forced into cover in any previous Remedy game as much as I did in Quantum Break.
The final boss fight was just frustrating and unreadable. Gone was the responsivity. Gone was the interesting encounter design. Gone was the motive. Gone was the interesting level design. I died way more often than I do in the other games (you bet I completed Alan Wake on Nightmare difficulty on the 360!). In the place of everything I love about Remedy games was this weird TV show that didnât seem anywhere near as good as the writing Iâve come to expect from Remedy.
I bought three copies of Alan Wake. I sometimes wonder if I regret my purchase of Quantum Break.
Even now, thinking about it, Iâm sad.
Now I hear Remedyâs working on a sequel to Crossfire, one of the most popular games in the world; I guess theyâre doing contract work for a single-player campaign or something? Thatâs pretty cool. I know they did some mobile stuff for a while. After Alan Wakeâs slow burn--a great game that game launched against Red Dead Redemption, was incredibly short, and had to fight an uphill battle in the face of some bad PR about the genre shift--and Quantum Breakâs disappointing reviews (itâs Remedyâs worst-performing retail game on Metacritic), Iâm worried.
Remedy deserves better. Remedy is better. I just hope they remember why.
Max Payne and Alan Wake are legendary because of a studio that had some of the best motion, action, and reaction in shooter design. Remedy is unparalleled in its unique storytelling and grand ideas. Everything about its combat just feels right. I hope Quantum Break was a misstep that wonât be repeated. Iâd love to see Remedy returning to the shooter arena some day, wiser and more focused, with strong player motive, that stylish, unique storytelling that defines their work, and much, much broader enemy and weapon sandboxes.
Iâm excited to see where Remedy goes next. Iâll play whatever they make. Control looks amazing and I canât wait to see Crossfire 2. The studio oozes talent and class; itâs one of the few studios I wish I could work for. Whatever the case is, even after a game that disappointed me, Iâm a big admirer of their work, and I always will be.
I grew up in a deeply religious family, one that eschewed âworldlyâ media for the religious variety. I remember Dad dragging us out of a showing of the Lion King one rainy September day--I think weâd gone to one of those theatres where the tickets were cheap and they only showed movies that had been out for a long time because my family was thrifty like that--because he was furious. Some time later, he explained to me that Disney was trying to brainwash us with âNew Age Philosophy,â and he was angry at the spirit that tried to do it to us. Not a great birthday memory for me.
But Narnia? It had magic and monsters and demons and werewolves, and for whatever reason, we were allowed to watch it whenever we went to Grandmaâs house. My parents drove us up to Independence, Missouri every few months for something called Enzyme Potentiated Desensitization, where we would stay with grandma and watch Narnia. EPD was an experimental allergen treatment that was banned in 2001.
I remember drinking water with bismuth in it and eating an awful meal that had the consistency of literal shit. This was supposed to help us get over our allergies, but I think the treatment was far worse. We werenât allowed to eat many things, and most of what we could eat was disgusting, so most of the time, we laid around, sick, feverish, and vomiting, and we ate reheated french fries from Wendyâs (McDonaldâs wasnât allowed due to the oil they used), and we watched all of Grandmaâs old movies.
My favorite one was The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a movie about kids who escaped the horrors of World War II by traveling to another dimension where it was always winter and a cruel, monstrous witch ruled with an iron hand. Eventually, thanks to the help of the Christ-like Aslan, they overthrew her.
It was a dark movie, a far cry from the generally happy, low-intensity religious movies Mom let us watch. Aslan died, yâknow. It was, to 8 year old me, the most incredible thing in the world. Later, I read the rest of the books, and I loved them too. My favorite was The Silver Chair, the darkest and least hopeful book of all. No one book had more of an impact on my artistic sensibilities than The Silver Chair. Real stakes! Real pain! Hope! Triumph! All the good stuff.
When I was 10, I found Digimon.
I was hanging out at Hyramâs place watching The Magic School Bus, a show that we werenât allowed to watch at my house because of the magic. Hyramâs family, being Mormon, had a more enlightened--so it seemed--outlook on the world, being okay with sci-fi and fantasy stories that my parents forbade us from seeing. So there we were, watching The Magic School Bus, and the commercials came on, and Fox Kids aired a commercial for Digimon (Adventure 01, Episode 28, in case you were wondering--the one with the ferocious Devidramon).
Digimon was even darker than Narnia. Itâs villains were literally Satan and a Vampire. Thereâs an episode where one of the kids is told her mother doesnât love her and as a result, sheâll never be able to help her friends. There was drama, self-doubt, pain, misery, and, in the end, the kids overcame the darkness that opposed them and triumphed.
Over the years, I found increasingly creative ways to catch my Digimon fix, going to the church next door with a cable Iâd found to connect to the TV so I could just barely catch Fox 24 when it was broadcasting. When Digimon stopped airing, I desperately searched for a way to download the show online, which led me to IRC, which took me to roleplay forums, which led me to Kotaku comments, and finally Twitter, which is where I know most of you from.
I realize this may all sound very self-indulgent, and Iâm sorry for that, but I feel itâs important to establish the personal context here. I love these stories about going to other worlds and experiencing things that our worlds could never give us. The stories acted as a kind of meta-transportation, a way of letting me escape the frustrations of my own life.
When I finally made the transition from cartoons and books to video games, everything seemed to snap into place. Games were the closest thing Iâd ever found to actually visiting Narnia or the Digital World. My friend Robert introduced me to Halo in his trailer home. My parents gave me Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it was like being able to fly planes in real life, so much so that when I eventually attended flight training, my instructors told me I flew like someone with thousands of hours under his belt.
Games let me go places.
Games let me see new things.
So, one day, in early 2007, I found a copy of PC Gamer with Bioshock on the cover in the Wal-Mart magazine aisle. I remember furtively browsing the issue, making sure Mom didnât suddenly round the corner and catch me reading it. The game looked incredible, but I was focused more on roleplaying forums at the time, and I forgot about it until that fall, a few weeks after it came out. CompUSA was going out of business and was selling off their games. I couldnât game at home--our computers were old Boeing surplus and ran the Half-Life 2 Ravenholm demo like a slideshow--but with a portable hard drive Iâd purchased and hid in the ceiling tiles of my bedroom, I could play them at the university I was attending.
So I did.
First person games appealed to me because they let me experience the game worlds as though they were real experiences. It was the closest thing to going to another world; third person games didnât elicit the same response, so I didnât play them as much. I was a big fan of the Age of Empires: Rise of Rome demo that came with my copy of Microsoft Flight Simluator, though. But it was the first person games, the ones I found on Maximum PC demo discs, that really mattered to me. Iâd played hundreds of hours of Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, and even Far Cry.
When I played Bioshock, everything changed. I had to get my own computer. Had to. I moved out in late December to go learn to fly at K-State Salina. Got really sick that spring--my illness was just starting to reveal itself--and I flunked most of my classes. I was so sick most days I couldnât leave the house. Got diagnosed with severe social anxiety disorder later. Only left the house at night unless I had classes, when I could make it to them at all. Iâd earned enough money the previous fall to build myself my own computer.
I played games.
Bioshock had led me to System Shock 2. I pirated a copy of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl because Iâd seen the disc at CompUSA (alongside Blacksite: Area 51) but only had the cash to buy Bioshock and The Orange Box without my parents noticing. I played FEAR and its expansions. All the Half-Life games. Crysis. Call of Duty 4. It was a great time to experience a lot of amazing first-person games.
System Shock and STALKER were the biggest influences.
When I moved back that summer, I scrounged and saved and used the last of my savings to buy STALKER: Clear Sky and Crysis Warhead. I played them while living in the unheated camping trailer my parents used to own (it was cheaper than paying for dorms whenever we attended church camps). It was cold. I could see my own breath most days. I got a job at Office Max and used it to buy a copy of Far Cry 2. A few weeks later, I picked up Fallout 3.
If youâre familiar with these games, youâll notice a lot of them have things in common. They do interesting things with the game world. Many are heavily systems driven compared to their contemporaries. STALKERâs world especially feels completely alive. System Shock 2 does a banginâ job of making you feel like youâre really exploring an abandoned spaceship. Far Cry 2âs systems-driven gameplay is fascinating and influences designers to this day. Fallout 3 has one of the best ecosystems in a video game, with enemies who you can wound and terrify and allied characters who will come to your aid.
Even Blacksite: Area 51 was a fascinating game. It had this cool morale system that had your soldiers responding to your commands and combat prowess in ways that, at the time, felt believable and awe-inspiring. In Crysis, if you dropped an unconscious man in a river, he would die because he drowned. Incredible. It felt real.
The games that shaped my experience took me to other worlds, shaping my perception of what games could be in a very specific direction. As someone whoâd grown up reading the old Microsoft Flight Simulator tagline âAs real as it gets,â I felt right at home.
I tried other games, like Nintendoâs platformers or controller-centric spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry 3, but I didnât like them. They were too obviously games. You got points. Everything was abstract. I was playing. I wasnât going anywhere.
As my health declined, the importance of traveling to other places increased. The mark of a good game for me became one where I could forget about the world I lived in and exist in another world. Iâm reminded of Lord Foulâs Bane, a book in which a writer with leprosy is transported to another world where he is healed of his leprosy. Games provided me that escape, especially the immersive ones.
Ah.
Right.
That word.
Immersion is nothing to be afraid of. Some people say that any game can be immersive, because one of the meanings of the word is roughly analogous to âengrossed,â but the English language is weird and tricky and sometimes two words share the same meaning in the dictionary but mean very different things.
To be engrossed in something is to have your attention completely arrested by it. To be immersed in something, well⌠when youâre immersed in water, you are literally, physically inside of it. You are a part of the water, as much as you can be.
I was seeking out immersive qualities in games without really understanding it. I would learn that some of my favorite games in the genre were literally called âimmersive sims.â Some people will argue that they are not engrossed by those games, so they cannot possibly be immersive, but Iâd argue that when youâre immersed in something, it surrounds you, youâre inside it. Whether or not it grabs your attention is up to you.
When a game is immersive, it might not grab your attention, but itâs doing its best to create a living, breathing world. When you drop an unconscious man in water, he drowns because that is what would happen in real life. When you perform well in combat, your allies rally around you. When you shoot an enemy in the leg, he limps.
An immersive game is one that does its best to represent a cohesive reality.
If you donât believe me, go listen to Paul Neurath, a founder of Looking Glass, a studio that made games like System Shock and Thief, talk about why they made the games they did. Look at the cool attempts at simulation elements in games made by LGS alumni, like Seamus Blackleyâs Jurassic Park: Trespasser, or Warren Spector and Harvey Smithâs Deus Ex. Emil Pagliarulo got a job at Bethesda and has a senior role (I forget what it is, exactly, sorry) on simulation-heavy games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
Heck, the Sega 2K Football games were praised as having some of the most sophisticated and realistic AI in sports games before the NFL decided it wasnât cool with yearly games being priced at a sub-premium price point. Marc LeBlanc worked on the AI for those.
The way I heard it, Looking Glass made flight simulators with realistic physics (I believe that was thanks to Blackleyâs background as a physicist). At some point, the folks at Looking Glass thought it would be cool to take Dungeons and Dragons style tabletop and make a game out of it, but instead of building something like the isometric Ultima, theyâd apply the flight simulator logic to it. The whole thing would be first person, and you could treat it like you were really there. Their publishing partner decided this new game should be an Ultima game, so Ultima Underworld was born.
After that, Looking Glass made a mix of flight simulators, golf games, and weird first-person games that took you to other worlds. System Shock put you on a space station. Thief let you do exactly what it said on the cover. Terra Nova was⌠well, read this piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. All of these games were fascinating and transformative, even if they had weirdly inaccessible control schemes.
Eventually, the studio died. Sony and Microsoft passed on buying them, Eidos made some poor financial decisions and couldnât pay them. Talent moved off to other studios. Eventually, they shut down.
A few developers tried to carry the torch. Ken Levineâs Irrational games released Bioshock, which was like the bro shooter version of System Shock. Ion Storm Austin produced Thief 3 and two Deus Ex games. Bethesdaâs work has become increasingly Looking Glass-influenced over the years. Clint Hockingâs Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 clearly learned from Looking Glassâ games as well.
Over in France, a guy named Raphael Colantonio founded a studio called Arkane. They made a game heavily inspired by Ultima Underworld called Arx Fatalis. Then they made another one, called Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, using a Ubisoft license.
As game tech got better, simulation elements became more pronounced. The German Yerli brothers unsuccessfully pitched a neat dinosaur game, but eventually managed to convince Ubisoft to publish Far Cry and EA to publish Crysis. Their games are mostly known for their graphics tech, but Iâve always been fond of their intriguing stabs at realism; on its highest difficulty, Crysisâ enemies speak Korean, making it difficult for most players to understand their callouts. Crysis lets players use the gameâs physics to enhance its combat, collapsing buildings on enemies or leveling foliage to give them access to easier sight lines. I wrote about one of my favorite levels here.
Bioshock brought the attention back, though. Even though it wasnât very simulation heavy, it gave players that sense of presence that so many had been craving. Some developers stumbled; Far Cry 2 is beloved by game designers but wasnât the critical or commercial success Ubisoft hoped. STALKER was one of the buggiest commercial games Iâve ever played, capable of crashing if you so much as blinked, so it didnât sell as well as THQ would have liked, and GSC Game World sought a new publisher for Clear Sky, then shifted to yet another publisher for Call of Pripyat.
Fallout 3 had more simulation elements than most of its contemporaries and, Iâd argue, did a better job presenting a living, breathing world than any other game of its generation, but people were too busy being mad that it wasnât a classic isometric RPG to notice.
So, this is where my head was at when I entered into the world of immersive sims. I was fascinated by simulation elements, in love with the idea of exploring other worlds, and, most importantly of all: I needed an escape from my health. Immersive games, some of them sims, some of them not, provided the escape I craved.
In 2011, I downloaded the leaked demo of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Iâd been mowing the lawn and was going to take a shower before sinking my teeth into it, but it was so engrossing that, before I knew it, five hours had passed and Iâd played the entire thing. As soon as I scraped the cash together, I bought myself a copy. It was the first game Iâd been able to afford in years.
I loved it.
The next year, Arkane roared back to life with Dishonored, which was one of my favorite games, not just because itâs really fucking good, not just because the world is fascinating and creative, not just because Harvey Smith, the man responsible for Deus Ex and Blacksite (he deserved better treatment from his publisher on that one; if theyâd had more time, I think it would have been rightly hailed as a masterpiece; as it stands, itâs a fascinating thing that I love to pieces), partnered up with Arkane to make it, but because it helped me get my first writing gig.
If you wanna read my thoughts on Dishonored, check it out here.
And yetâŚ
Something felt off.
Not about Dishonored, but about the conversation surrounding immersive design. Iâd read posts by people who talked about the importance of design, who placed a weird focus on systems-driven design, who seemed to think that immersive games were stealth games and nothing but.
Before Dishonored and Human Revolution, I recall reading one of the foremost voices in immersive design discourse proclaiming the genre was dead because Looking Glass and Ion Storm had shut down. He argued, while Fallout 3 was selling millions of copies, that immersive sims were dead because they werenât commercially viable. Many agreed with him.
After the apparent sales failings of Prey (Arkane), Dishonored 2, and Mankind Divided, Iâve heard those conversations picking up again.
I think theyâre wrong, and Iâd like to try to explain why.
I think a lot of the people who talk about immersive sims, focusing on immersive design and talking about what these games should be, tend to get hung up on Very Specific Details without looking at the bigger picture. Go watch the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter pitch video, and youâll hear Neurath talk about how important it is to solve problems logically. Go listen to a lot of the immersive sim fans talk about games, and youâll hear them talking about⌠well, other things.
One thing I feel like I see a lot is an emphasis on stealth mechanics. Thatâs great! I love stealth games. But Iâd argue that stealth is not an important part of immersive games. Some people have told me that they donât think Bethesda games are immersive sims because the stealth in those games is nowhere near as in depth as Thief. Maybe, maybe, but hereâs the thing:
I think you could make an immersive game where youâre 12 years old and youâre visiting your grandparents at their farm on an island somewhere, and the entire game is just about being a kid exploring a little seaside town and making new friends. I think you could catch fireflies and go to the library and go fishing and do all sorts of things on an island that feels just as alive as STALKER, without actually doing any stealth.
But if you go play Dishonored or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or the Thief games, or whatever, youâre going to have the immersive sim community types talking about how important stealth is. Thief is good, but get over it. Itâs just one manifestation of a broader genre. Stealth is GREAT. Dishonored so good I will buy any Dishonored game sight unseen. I would kill to get a job working for Arkane, even if it was like⌠as a janitor or something. I love those people and I love their games.
I think the emphasis on stealth is part of the reason a lot of these games have failed. I love stealth games for the same reason I love horror games; theyâre high-intensity, high-stakes games that, when you play them well, make you feel like a real master. Iâd also argue that stealth is exhausting. Maybe Iâm more attuned to this than most due to the whole chronic fatigue thing, but likeâŚ
In a stealth game, success can feel like failure. Youâre constantly feeling the pucker factor. If you are seen, you fail, even if the game doesnât actually have an instant failure state. When I get seen in Dishonored, I have to fight. Fighting is really fun, but getting caught means I wasnât able to do what I wanted to; I messed up. Iâm a failure. A lot of stealth stuff ends up feeling like constantly being on edge and failing because you had to kill like 5 dudes who saw you. I played Hitman last night and every time I killed or choked out someone who saw me, I just wanted to start the whole thing over.
Iâd argue that most people feel this way when playing stealth games. They donât like the stress. A little stealth is nice, especially in a game like Far Cry 5 where you can approach a base with a sniper rifle and take out like 6 dudes without them noticing you, but getting into a firefight afterwards feels fun and purposeful too, so you get a nice mix of occasional stealth and action. I think thatâs probably why Far Cry 5 is the best-selling video game of 2018 so far (Red Dead releases tomorrow).
I love that weâre making stealth games with immersive elements, but I think weâre making a mistake when we assume that immersive games must be stealthy ones. There are so many games that claim to learn from immersive games--Mark of the Ninja, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Wildfire, Quadrilateral Cowboy--and they do, but theyâre also so very focused on stealth (the ones Iâve played are all among my favorite games, by the way! Please donât think of this as a knock against them!). I canât think of any game that claims to be influenced by immersive sims that doesnât have stealth.
Stealth is a verb (short version: game design speak for âthing you can doâ). It is not the genre.
Then thereâs the whole âdesignâ thing. Mario games are exceptionally designed. Each level is a unique, bespoke challenge, stacking mechanics on top of mechanics and helping you develop your mastery over the experience. This design comes at the expense of⌠well, Iâll get to that later. For now, Iâll just say that Mario Feels Like A Game.
Thatâs not a bad thing, but, like, youâve got this for, so you know what Iâm about. You can see why that might not appeal to me personally.
Buuuuuuut⌠a lot of the newer, like⌠I donât know, itâs weird to call them âdesign-focused,â because all games are designed, a lot of these newer immersive sim type games seem focused on that kind of immaculate design. Walk into the bank in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and youâll see The Person You Can Talk Your Way Past If You Have That Skill, youâll see The Lasers You Can Sneak Past If You Can Turn Invisible, youâll see The Vending Machine You Can Lift If You Have The Strength Ability, and youâll see The Air Vent You Can Crawl Through To Get To The Computer You Can Hack If Youâre A Hacker.
Mankind Divided will give you The Most Experience Points for playing this without being detected and without killing anyone.
Suddenly, you are incentivized to treat the game like a game because it is objectively better for you to approach all objectives in a specific way. Heck, in Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, after youâve nonlethally subdued everyone in a room, you can hack all the computers (even if you have a password) and crawl through all the vents (though thereâs no reason to) for Maximum Points. It⌠it makes no sense. Youâre not trying to be a part of the world. The game rewards you for engaging with it on a level that must recognize the game as an illusion.
Itâs not the only game. I loved Prey, but I got the sense that I was being graded as I played, which meant I started playing more to the gameâs expectations of me rather than how I felt I ought to act. Look, I grew up in a family environment where people were sneaking up on me to see if I was acting righteously. I grew up in a church where I was paraded in front of two hundred kids and told that I had The Devil in me because my pottery had shattered in their shoddily-built kiln and destroyed most of the rest of the pottery. I am so fucking tired of being judged, so exhausted of having to act a specific way to avoid being treated like garbage, I donât want games to do it to me too. I just want to act in a way that feels appropriate.
In Eidos Montrealâs immersive sim games (and most immersive games, for that matter), I felt like I was running into The Metroid School of Design, in which a player is unable to progress through a level without the right tool, with one key difference: there are multiple tools you can use to progress. Four routes into the same room, every room, all the time.
This creates a sense of artifice. When I see a bunch of chandeliers and mysterious, architecturally suspect vents that show me an obvious route through a map, I see the designerâs hand. I see that the designer has planned all these routes for me. They have planned for any eventuality. They want me to sneak my way through this room, regardless of the skills I have at my disposal.
I can play their game in just one way. I can ghost-stealth it perfectly and get The Good Ending, or I can Violence Through It and get less progress points and The Bad Ending. If I am a hacker, there will always be a door to hack. If I am a fighter, there will always be a man to fight.
Oh, sure, the best games will give you a dozen tools that can be combined in really interesting ways, but someone has figured out what all those tools are and designed each level to perfectly accommodate every. Single. tool.
Every level is a puzzle, and puzzles are designed by a human with the intent to solve them. You donât need to be creative--heck, sometimes, being creative is actively discouraged--because all you need to do is figure out what the designer wanted you to do and do it. Ah, I have tools X, Y, and Z? I know exactly where Iâm supposed to deploy them. See, thereâs the path you can blink through and the door you can bypass with a specific tool or the fish you can possess to swim through.
And⌠I cannot stress this enough:
Itâs not bad.
Itâs good.
Itâs very good. I fucking love these games. They mean the world to me. They do.
But can you see how that might not be what I was looking for, and how I feel thatâs⌠quite a long way removed from what Looking Glass was trying to do? Instead of solving solutions in a natural way, these games have created very nice puzzle worlds. As someone who loves puzzles, this is wonderful, but as someone who loved what Looking Glass and STALKER were doing⌠I canât help but feel my own needs and interests arenât being met.
I mentioned I was playing Hitman. I love it. I love it to pieces. I just did a Suit Only, Silent Assassin run and it was thrilling. But, like⌠I knew the route the guy would take. I knew The Device that I could interact with to take him off his path. I didnât feel like I was improvising; instead, I was looking at one of several dozen ways the designers had very carefully placed in my path.
I can see you, designer. I know youâre there.
I couldnât see the designer in STALKER. Everything felt natural to me. I woke up in a bunk. I met Sidorovich. He asked me to run a job for him. On my way to the job, there were dead animals and a wounded Stalker. He asked me for a med kit. I gave him the med kit. He became my friend. I joined a few Stalkers and we took out a bandit camp.
This will happen in every playthrough. It has been designed. I get that. But it wasnât like a designer came in shouting PLAY YOUR WAY, ALSO THIS IS A STEALTH GAME, right? I could take out that encampment however I wanted. The more I play, the more tools I find. Sometimes, they randomly pop out of an anomaly. Other times, I find them on the corpses of people who died in a brutal gunfight. In Clear Sky, the gun you wield in the opening cinematic can be found right where you left it. Itâs broken, but you can find a man to repair it, and later, you can get ammo for it by eliminating high-level enemies.
If someone says âhey, please help me take out this facility,â thatâs all the direction you have. How you take it out is up to you. Stealth it? Sure. Lead mutants to it? Absolutely. Come in under cover of night or rain? You bet. STALKERâs verbs might be limited, but the game itself is so much more flexible. Sneak in through a crack in the wall or charge the front gate.
You play your way, but âyour wayâ doesnât mean four skill trees, it means âhereâs a real, tangible space, with no hint of the designerâs hand. This feels real, like it actually exists in the outskirts of Chernobyl. There are bad men inside. Go get them, using whatever tools you have available to you.â
STALKER feels natural.
In fact, if there was one word Iâd use to describe my ideal immersive game, ânatural.â Would be that word. When I play Far Cry 2, I am playing a Designed Game. This is the Friendly NPC Zone. There are no friendly NPCs outside it. You can safely kill everyone because theyâre bad. Everyone hits hard, so itâs best to snipe them. Make sure to go to the safe house, which looks exactly like all the other safe houses (and has the exact same supplies plus one unique bonus gun) to engage The Buddy Systemâ˘, recharging your Buddy MeterÂŽ so your BuddyÂŽ will come to your aid when you go down One Time. If you go down a second time, he will die. This is how it always happens. It will never deviate.
In STALKER, I was caught finding bandits when a man named Edik Dinosaur passed by. He and I had met on occasion on the road. Edik Dinosaur fought valiantly alongside me, because he hated bandits and he liked me. I accidentally shot him during the encounter. He died because of me. That was way more impactful than Far Cry 2âs Super Obvious Buddy System, you know?
It was like I was there. I had to grapple with a sense of guilt at shooting blindly into the brush after a fleeing bandit.
I remember a story of someone playing an old Zelda game, I think it was Ocarina of Time, when their mom walked in and asked them what they were doing. They explained that, to cross a bridge, they had to get some item to unlock it. âWhy donât you just chop down a tree to cross the river?â came the reply. The storyteller said they rolled their eyes at this and thought their mom was crazy, but later, they were like âactually, yeah, why canât I do that?â
Breath of the Wild let players do just that. It was hailed as a brilliant new Zelda game and seems more beloved than⌠basically every Zelda game in decades? This is a game where you can shoot a fire arrow, watch the grass catch fire, and use the updrafts to fling yourself into the sky, which lets you drop down on top of your foes for a powerful melee attack.
I have my complaints with the game, which you can read here, but Iâm fascinated by the way its overworld avoids just outright telling you how to play and letting you figure out how to solve the problems it presents to you. Instead of being A Puzzle Game, Breath of the Wildâs overworld feels like a stylized yet real space. Its people are alive. Its spaces are not clearly designed to be exploited by specific mechanics. The Designerâs Hand is invisible.
This brings me to Bethesda.
Yes, sure, if youâre an RPG fan, Bethesda probably isnât going to make you a happy camper. The writing can be stupid at times. They let you do anything, even though the narrative acts as though youâre on an urgent mission. The modular system design makes the world feel super artificial, and you can exploit the gameâs systems in dumb, unrealistic ways, like putting a bucket on a personâs head (the AI has no sense of personal space and doesnât mind) so he canât see you steal things, or you can craft a million daggers so you can be The Best At Blacksmithing or whatever.
But⌠the thing is, when I hop into a Bethesda world, it feels relatively real. While you have a lot of skills that make you better at playing specific ways, like Unarmed or Melee or Rifles or Handguns or whatever, youâre never walking into a fight and seeing Five Specific Tool-Driven Routes and deciding which tool is The Best One For The Job.
I feel like too many immersive sims are specifically stealth-driven games with immaculate designer-driven puzzles that give you a dozen different tools to use How You Want (but, hint hint, there are a few very clear routes).
Bethesda games give you a billion tools and let you loose in the world, much like STALKER does. You can shoot someone so much they become afraid of you and run away, but some people are less afraid than others and will fight you to the death. Take out a guy with a good gun, and his buddy will run over, pick it up, and use it against you unless you can get to him first. Approach this fort aggressively, sneak in, talk your way in, do whatever. Itâs going to depend as much on whoâs in the fort as it is on you. Heck, I think in Skyrim, if youâre wearing Imperial gear, you can walk into an Imperial fort without anyone realizing youâre not an Imperial.
Bethesda games let you play how you want in the moment.
They let you formulate a plan based on what you feel like doing, and sometimes, youâre going to find places you canât take on because nobody bothered to design a way for a specific character build to attack. Come back later or get creative. It feels more natural than most immersive sims because itâs trying to be a real place, rather than an artfully designed one. Yeah, Bethesda games have rough edges. They do!
And yet⌠they are immensely successful, and I think itâs because theyâre actually trying to send their players to other worlds. Theyâre not demanding you play stealthily, theyâre not giving you the same routes so that every player can play One Specific Play Style. Theyâre bringing a world to life and letting you live in it. In Skyrim, I can go save the world and become the boss of the Magic College, or I can be a simple elk hunter, peddling my wares.
I guess where Iâm at is⌠we saw one studio trying incredible things in games, and they went under through little fault of their own. Their successors didnât find the smashing success that the enthusiasts think they deserve, but I think thatâs because⌠well⌠a lot of the enthusiasts are just looking at one or two games on the spectrum and refusing to make anything else. I think so many of the genreâs fans have a very limited, very specific view of what the genre can be, which is why none of them have managed to recapture the glory of Looking Glass; theyâre not making the kind of games Looking Glass was, no matter how much they claim that they are.
Thereâs too much artifice in the inheritors.
Bethesdaâs out there making billions of dollars because their games live up to the Looking Glass ideal more than anything else out there. These other games, this other design philosophy, itâs great. I love it. Itâs wonderful and beautiful and fascinating, but when I see people arguing that ânobody wants immersive games,â because those games didnât break sales records, I want to scream âhow would you know? Youâve made something else!â
STALKER sold like 6 million copies. Skyrimâs up at like⌠what, 20 million now? Breath of the Wild has sold a bajillion copies. Red Dead Redemption 2 is poised to be the second best-selling game of 2018 after Black Ops IIII. Grand Theft Auto V made a billion billion dollars and itâs got some of the most sophisticated immersion elements in video games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of the âcould this realistically work?â games out there and it made a ton of cash. When you make a game thatâs really about existing in a living, breathing world, you can make a shitload of cash.
When you make a stealth game with a lot of Specific Tools and Obvious Routes, youâre making a great video game, but you arenât making an immersive one. Thatâs okay, but please donât argue that we should stop making immersive games because your model didnât work. The immersive model is thriving. You just made something else.
Imagine this: you are working on a game, and you are responsible for designing a quest. It might not have that name, but thatâs how most people will think of it. In a quest, the player is given a task or series of tasks which they must then complete in order to advance in some meaningful way, whether through an experience reward, because they canât finish the story without it, or something else. How do you make a good quest?
Alright, now imagine something else. Imagine youâre a player, and youâre playing as an expert monster slayer who just rolled into town, seeking revenge against Bogbort Denglesmith, a guy who killed your dog. Looking for clues to Bogbortâs whereabouts, you amble into the nearby tavern, where the barkeep tells you that heâll tell you who knows where Bogbort is. All you need to do is go into the cellar, kill 10 rats, and bring back their tails as proof. So you do. You walk into the cellar, mindlessly kill some rats, and the barkeep tells you to go talk to the priest.
So⌠you talk to the priest. And the priest says âwell, Iâd love to help you, but right now, Iâm trying to help Sadie Jenkins with A Personal Problem, so if you want to know where Bogbort is, youâre going to have to find Sadie. I think sheâs at the market. If not, ask around, and Iâm sure someone will tell you where she is.â
So you go the market. Sheâs not there, because of course she isnât. So you find someone who says sheâs at the tavern, so you go back there, but sheâs not there. The barkeep says she usually goes to the graveyard this time of day, so you head to the graveyard, and sure enough, there she is, but sheâs surrounded by goblins! So you fight the goblins, save her, she says âthank you, I need to gather my thoughts, go back to the priest and tell him you helped me out.â So you go back to the priest, and he tells you that he knows Bogbort had been somewhere else, and if you went there, youâd probably find some clues.
Hereâs why precisely none of that is fun.
First off, weâve got our generic starter tutorial. Itâs a standard fetch quest, which means someone wants you to go do mindless busywork for them. You know itâs busywork, they know itâs busywork, literally none of it is fun. More importantly, you know the outcome of the quest. Itâs quid pro quo. Ten rat kills, one piece of information to advance the storyline. This means that the only way anyone is going to see that quest as anything other than an obstacle is if the combat is literally the best, most fun, most perfectly joyful combat system in the history of the universe, and can you honestly say that your game is going to have a combat system that feels like falling in love for the first time every time you kill a rat?
Probably not.
Now, most gamers understand this. Nobody puts a fetch quest on their list of âbest quests in a video game ever.â Nobody even remembers them, except for the mild frustration at feeling the intense friction of âyou are a mighty hero, now go take out the trash.â Youâve almost certainly heard of someone, somewhere, telling you how bad fetch quests were, and if this piece was just about fetch quests, I wouldnât have written it.
But what about the next quest, with the priest? Why does that one suck?
Okay, so a long time ago, people figured out that the number three was pleasing. We call this The Rule of Three. Three little pigs, three billy goats gruff, three little bears. Itâs too cold, too hot, just right, that kind of thing. It just seems natural, right? Every story has three acts, a beginning, middle, and end. Itâs not something we tend to question. But we should. Consider, for instance, the three act structure. It sounds awesome, right? But did you know that most television shows rely on a five-act structure? Shakespeare did too.
But Iâm not here to say âdonât use The Rule of Threes in your game design.â
Consider Sadieâs quest. Letâs say we completed the objective four times. Go to the market, she isnât there, go to the tavern, she isnât there, go to the library, she isnât there, go to the graveyard, sheâs there. We still run into the same problem we had before. The quest is still predictable. It still feels like busywork. It doesnât match up with the fantasy weâve established for our character. Itâs mindless and dull.
But most importantly?
Itâs not dramatic.
I come from a film background, and they drilled the importance of drama into us at every single turn. Drama is, simply put, the thing that occurs when a protagonist who wants something runs into an obstacle and must overcome that obstacle to reach their goal. Drama happens when our protagonist wants to get a glass of milk, drives to the grocery store, is about to get their milk, and then a robber comes in waving a gun demanding cash. Wasting our time by going âwell, the person isnât here,â thatâs nowhere near as interesting.
Thereâs a playwright/movie writer, David Mamet, who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, who had some pretty interesting things to say on the topic.
Take it away, David.
AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.
THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN *DRAMA* AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.
EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A SHITLOAD OF *INFORMATION* INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.
OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE *INFORMATION* â AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.
BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDNâT, I WOULDNâT. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.
QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, *ACUTE* GOAL.
SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES *OF EVERY SCENE* THESE THREE QUESTIONS.
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DONâT GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?
THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.
IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.
THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. *YOU* THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE *EVERY* SCENE IS DRAMATIC.
THIS MEANS ALL THE âLITTLEâ EXPOSITIONAL SCENES OF TWO PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD. THIS BUSHWAH (AND WE ALL TEND TO WRITE IT ON THE FIRST DRAFT) IS LESS THAN USELESS, SHOULD IT FINALLY, GOD FORBID, GET FILMED.
IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT *WILL* BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WEâRE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.
Why he wrote it in all caps, I donât know, but the point is simple: if your scene isnât dramatic, people wonât care. If people wonât care, then they arenât going to want to keep playing. You know about those crazy stats that say most people donât even finish games? Look at the completion stats for short games--they arenât completed any more than long games are. Length was never the problem. It was always about whether or not people cared. People donât care about nondramatic quests.
When you give someone a rule of three quest, youâre telling them whatâs going to happen. One of the worst offenders is a mission in Halo 4 that has you entering a tower, standing still on a platform as it travels from point A to point C, getting off the platform at point B, fighting through some enemies, pressing a button, getting back on the platform and resuming your journey to point C⌠and then repeating that entire process two more times. Riding the platform isnât fun. Fighting the exact same group of enemies isnât fun. Itâs basically just copy/pasting the same environment three times. If you did it once, you know what happens next. If you know what happens next, you have no reason to care unless the combat is flawless.
But the dirty little secret about video games is that even with absolutely flawless gameplay (say, for instance, Alan Wake), if players feel theyâre doing the same thing repeatedly, it will feel boring. This means that you, as a game developer, have to change up objectives, environments, and stakes in a meaningful way. If the player can predict the outcome of the quest, if nothing changes throughout, if they simply perform busywork, then everything is, well, bushwah.
Letâs not forget, our question, our very important question, wasnât âwhat makes a bad quest?â it was âhow do you make a good quest?â To understand what makes a good quest, we have to understand this one, simple thing: no drama makes bad quests. Drama makes good quests.
âWait!â protests the reasonable game developer, âweâre not wealthy! We donât have infinite budget! One of the reasons we do fetch quests and rule of three quests is because making custom assets is expensive!â
Yeah. Thatâs true, but not every quest needs immensely expensive, custom, scripted sequences to be good. In fact, a quest can be mechanically poor and still feel brilliant. It all comes down to context.
A while back, I played a game that had been directed by some former developers on The Witcher 3, a game known for its great quests. If I recall correctly, one of the people was specifically cited as having worked on The Witcher 3âs quests, so I figured the quests would be great. They werenât.
Now, I could just shrug it off and hypothesize that these people lacked some âsecret sauceâ that made The Witcher 3 great, or I could dig deeper. Maybe the quests were different mechanically? After all, the games themselves were very genres. So letâs look at the quests.
In The Witcher 3, a number of quests involve talking to people, following clues (pressing a button, looking for highlighted objects, and wandering after them), and then searching in a large circle for an objective. In fact, most of the gameâs quests are like that. Maybe you go here or there to kill a certain number of monsters, but honestly⌠most of The Witcher 3 is just walking somewhere, talking to someone, using your witcher senses, searching big circles on the ground, and interacting with objects.
The Witcher 3 wasnât great because it had unique mechanics, it was great because it contextualized those mechanics in interesting ways. Thereâs a quest in The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone that has Geralt herding pigs into a pen, playing Gwent, the card-playing minigame, getting into a fistfight, fetching some wine for his friend Shani, and diving for shoes in a nearby pond. The quest steps themselves are simple, with each one utilizing pre-existing mechanics. In the case of the pigs, AI animals will often run away from Geralt when he gets near, so the quest simply uses this behavior and awards Geralt a point whenever he chases an animal into the right zone. What makes this questline memorable and fun arenât unique mechanics or expensive set pieces, but the fact that none of it seems like busywork.
The entire quest involves flirting with your friend Shani, hanging out as her plus one at a wedding, even meeting one of the greatest villains in The Witcher 3 in the process. Itâs fun. Itâs memorable because it fits with the character. The quest steps seem frivolous, but theyâre fun games you play at a party, not boring quid pro quo chores. Itâs about spending good times with people.
One of my favorite quests is structured something like:
Fight people
Investigate pigs
Talk to someone
Find a hut, enter it, and investigate
Talk to a pig
Kill wolves
Lead pigs to safety
Cure the pigs and turn them back into people
Doesnât seem that dramatic, but the context (humans have been turned into pigs!) and the fact that itâs hilarious being a grown man talking to pigs and hoping theyâre humans that were turned into pigs and not just normal pigs.
The Witcher 3âs quests often rely on narrative progression; rather than âgo to one hut, go to the second hut, go to the third hut where the pigs are,â you think thereâs something fishy about the pigs, you try to figure out why the pigs are weird, once you do, you try to save the pigs by protecting them and leading them to safety. The steps are different every time; it feels more natural and engaging. Thereâs a sense of progression, rather than feeling like youâre performing a lot of useless action.
The other game had none of this. It was a lot of âsearch in this circle for x number of things,â or âget me y number of pelts.â It was busywork that didnât match the character, that didnât serve any purpose other than to be an arbitrary progression gate.
Good quest design is good storytelling. Good storytelling matters; thereâs a reason each scene or beat is there. Turning three cranks to open a floodgate or something isnât exciting or meaningful. When you design a quest, think about how the player will feel about it. What can you do to surprise and delight them? How can you use the mechanics you have to tell a story? In Paratopic, my game, we used a lot of the same mechanics to do different things. We used shooting mechanics for both photography and actually shooting someone. We gave players dozens of meaningless interactions, like putting out a cigarette, looking at a box of ramen, or squeezing a bottle of ketchup, to give each space a sense of real purpose. The only time we made the player repeat meaningless action was when we wanted to create a sense of boredom that comes with driving for hours across the open countryside.
Making a good quest means making a dramatic quest, one that surprises and delights players. If they can predict what comes next and it doesnât excite them, then weâve failed to make great quests.
In most of my articles, I start out by presenting a problem. Maybe a lot of gamers hate zombies, and I want to write about a zombie game I love, so I present the problem of the zombie game, explaining in detail why Iâm sympathetic to the concerns of people who hate zombie games, before explaining how the zombie game I love gets around that problem.
I do this because weâre rarely wrong about our feelings, but weâre often wrong about why. If I wrote âhereâs a good zombie game,â no one would want to read that if they donât like zombie games. By writing âthis is why zombie games bore you and hereâs how zombie games can excite you,â I appeal to a broader audience.
This brings me to Final Fantasy XV, a game one of my backers asked me to cover.
Good games writing often happens when an expert explains the ins and outs of a genre they know well to an audience they assume are quite intelligent but arenât as familiar with the subject as they are. When I wrote about walking sims last year, I sat down and I went âokay, a lot of you are bored with walking sims. Why is that?â My editorâs boss didnât seem to like it that much, insisting that the walking sim didnât need any defending (even though The Chinese Room, developers of walking sims, had just shut down, and Tacoma, a walking sim with magazine covers, had sold a mere 10,000 copies). But I think people have strong feelings about things and they want to understand those feelings, so having an expert help them out without talking down to them is wonderful.
A little bit of history.
I may be an expert on video games, but I am most assuredly not an expert on JRPGs.
Unlike most people, I didnât grow up with video game consoles. I saw a meme posted the other day saying âyou canât argue with me about games unless your first console was a Genesis or NES.â Mine was an Xbox 360, but Iâve been playing computer games for a great deal longer. Since Japan didnât make many computer games (oh, sure, Final Fantasy VII was developed for Windows 95, but I donât recall seeing it amidst the Diablo 2, Planescape Torment, and Half-Life boxes at CompUSA back in the day), JRPGs were never really a part of my gaming diet.
Itâs not to say that JRPGs werenât appealing. When my wisdom teeth were pulled, my mom brought our little 13â portable TV into my room and let me watch movies. I stumbled upon UHF channel 53, which broadcast a pirated version of TechTV, which was, at the time, airing Anime Unleashed, a block of awesome anime shows like Last Exile and Crest of the Stars. Most anime Iâd seen up to that point was the stuff we got on kidâs shows, like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. Digimon aside, most of it was garbage. Watching Boogiepop Phantom or Serial Experiments Lain during late nights on this stupid little black and white TV was something else entirely.
Since then, Iâve loved good anime aesthetics, so youâd think that JRPGs would be my jam. I thought so too, which is why I started talking to friends about them, but every time I did, my friends would talk about what confusing bullshit they were--especially, at the time, Final Fantasy X. â...but Final Fantasy VIII is better!â theyâd tell me, and of course Iâd ask them about that, and theyâd tell me even more confusing bullshit. Plus, the whole turn-based gameplay thing was a huge turnoff. I got into other games, like Age of Empires and Unreal Tournament. They were more interesting. Games like Max Payne had way better stories than Final Fantasy VIII, thatâs for sure.
Once, someone got me into Earthbound on an emulator, and I fell in love with it, until someone kidnapped zippy--I think she has a ârealâ canon name but I donât know what it is and I donât want to know--and I couldnât beat any of the fights because I didnât understand the concept of grinding. Over the years, I tried other JRPGs, because the premise and the art sounded cool, but I bounced off the gameplay or the presentation time and time again. The closest I got to loving a JRPG was Dragonâs Dogma, and that was more of an open world sandbox game than any kind of RPG.
This brings me to another point.
JRPGs arenât RPGs.
People usually protest when I make this point. Either Iâm wrong or it doesnât matter, they say, but I think it does matter because Iâm a game designer, and understanding the specifics of genre is a really useful skill for a game designer to have. When I look at the JRPG, I see a lot of very specific elements that make them stand apart. If I say âI want to make an RPG,â chances are, I will not make something like a JRPG. If I say âI want to make a JRPG,â I will. The mechanics are distinct and interesting and worth examining on their own; no JRPG in existence could ever stand up to even a half-decent RPG if we judged it by RPG terms. The roleplaying just isnât there.
Judging JRPGs by their own standards lets us see these wonderful games for what they really are. JRPGs are not RPGs from Japan. Theyâre not even RPGs. Once, when I made this argument, a guy fought back by arguing that a game wasnât an RPG unless it had a party (Witcher 3 doesnât), a bestiary (pretty sure New Vegas hasnât got one), was turn-based (quick, someone tell Dragon Age!), and had a linear narrative (hahahahahahaha!).
âBut youâre playing a role!â
Playing a role means following a script, which is what you do in any game without choice and consequence. Roleplay is a specific kind of improvisational acting thatâs about creating and defining your relationship with the world around you. Dragon Age: Origins is a roleplaying game: you can be a dwarf commoner or a human noble or whatever, and your various choices will have major impacts on your relationships. You can define the person that you are. They are tabula rasa.
In every JRPG Iâve ever seen, you are a specific character with a specific personality, and while you may have some choices--Noctis in FFXV can choose to let the crew pull over and take a group photo whenever Prompto asks him too--those choices have little impact on the overall narrative or Noctisâ relationships with the characters around him. Lunafreya will always love him, Gladiolus will always get mad at him when Ignis loses his vision, etc.
Different kinds of games.
Pillars of Eternity, which isnât a great game, but one I enjoyed well enough, let me set my characterâs stats prior to playing the game. I defined my character as a rogue with great mechanical skills and dexterity. In Final Fantasy XV, when you level up⌠you canât really control how your characterâs stats changed.
None of this is bad! Itâs just different, like the difference between a third person shooter and a first person shooter. First person shooting lets you focus on the environment and your interactions with it, but third person shooters tend to focus on your character. They have their own unique strengths. You canât judge a first person shooter by third person standards and vice versa. The same is true with JRPGs and RPGs. They are different games. And thatâs good.
The Game:
When it comes to Final Fantasy XV, this is the foundation I have. Iâm vaguely turned off by all the stories Iâve heard, I love the aesthetics of most of them, and the gameplay is something I feel is wholly distinct from other games.
Final Fantasy XV appealed to me because it had real-time action combat instead of being a heavily menu-focused turn-based affair.
So, hereâs the deal: youâre Prompto, a prince, who is on his way to meet the object--and really, she is treated like an object in this game--of his arranged marriage, Lunafreya, whoâs the princess of a rival kingdom, I guess? Except the wiki says sheâs a captive of Niflheim, but she seems to get along well with her brother, who is in charge of the armies of Niflheim, so⌠like⌠yeah, I donât really know whatâs going on there.
The wiki also says sheâs the âmain heroineâ of the game, even though she barely has any screen time at all. She has magical powers that cures people of some weird plague thatâs making nights last longer, except that the nights are still getting longer and more people are succumbing to the plague, so sheâs really bad at her job.
Honestly, sheâs just there to look pretty and say things like âNoct, please hurry.â Then she dies. Then one time her ghost shows up and uses force powers to save the crew by removing plot armor that was only put there so she could show up to remove it.
She is not emotionally important to you.
This isnât like Alan Wake, a game that reveals over time the complex nature of Alanâs relationship and just how wonderful of a person Alice Wake is. In that game, Alan was motivated by guilt, and you, as a player, could connect to him because you got to see all of this unfold. You wanted to help Alan find Alice not because âAlice is Alanâs wife,â but because you saw that these two wonderful, flawed people loved and cared for each other and deserved happiness.
Lunafreya is a pantomime of a love interest, but thereâs never any real love there, so thereâs no urgency to actually chase her down, no sense of loss when she dies. Itâs not all her fault though (I mean, duh, itâs Squareâs fault). Noct is equally culpable. Heâs just⌠kinda empty. Heâs a shell who occasionally feels things when the script calls for it (ur dad died, be sad, ur gf died, be sad), but who doesnât feel like a real person. I donât really care about anything Noct wants. I just kind of do the objectives because theyâre whatâs next.
I spent my whole life being told that JRPG stories were the best that video games had to offer, and⌠look, being completely honest here, Final Fantasy XV is the JRPG plot as described to me--incomprehensible, pointless, and horribly paced, doing grandiose things because the developers want to do grandiose things, never earning a second of the awe it expects you to have.
âYup,â I found myself thinking when I finished it, âthis is exactly like every JRPG that has ever been described to me except Earthbound.â
Earthbound is great.
Final Fantasy XV makes the mistake of assuming that because it looks epic, it is epic, but since it earns nothing, it isnât epic at all. Itâs a hodgepodge of ideas. Maybe other JRPGs do a better job, but based on every other JRPG Iâve played, like Xenoblade Chronicles and Suikoden, itâs just not a very compelling game.
So it may surprise you to know that I liked it a great deal.
Brotherhood.
In my film education, we talked a great deal about the idea of the âmale as default.â A lot of this is rooted in idiotic Freudian psychology (especially all the Lacan stuff), so itâs as bunk as astrology, even when it sounds good, but letâs not throw the baby out with the bathwater here: all media has a perspective, and most mediaâs perspective assumes the male perspective as the neutral one.
American film does this too: it assumes everything is seen through American eyes. Most Hollywood movies are very, very American-as-default things, but that doesnât mean theyâre American movies. Iâm not just talking geography, Iâm talking assumptions about customs, camera angles, lighting, and so on. Russian film (European films too, but especially Russian film) tends to focus on specific body parts, using juxtaposition in editing to create specific senses about things. American films tend to favor wider shots, creating those same moods through things like motion and staging.
A film from another country can feel like it came from a different mind than the Hollywood monolithâŚ
...and yetâŚ
...there are very few genuinely American films out there. This is partly because most American films are built for export to other countries, so rather than focusing on specifically American subject matter, they focus on more universal things like drama and romance. Since America is so good at exporting American film, and many other cultures imitate the stylings of American films (because learning from successful things is how you succeed, after all), we end up with a very dominant American culture that has very little to actually say about America. In fact, lots of what America is tends to get lost in the shuffle.
If youâre lucky, you get filmmakers like Terrence Malick, who make films that are really about America and being American, but the significance of this is lost because people look at it and go âwhy do you make American films? All films are American!â But there is something specific there. Something interesting.
Maleness is the same way. Itâs the assumed default in a lot of narratives, but because of this, very little attention is given to it. I once walked into the USAF museum while the XB-70 Valkyrie was in one of the hangars and didnât see it because it was so big I thought it was the ceiling. Maleness in fiction is like that; itâs rarely examined closely because itâs too busy being big.
Here are two men. They are friends. The end.
We rarely look at how men bond, how they perceive each other, how they fight, how they talk and think because weâre too busy writing stories about the basic, empty characters who travel from point A to point B and the adventures they have along the way.
Oh, sure, sometimes you have people interrogating maleness, but theyâre really only doing it to say âlook whatâs bad about being a man,â because they assume that male-as-default means we already see male-as-good, when really, male-as-default is male-as-nonspecifity. The beauty of maleness is rarely ever explored.
Somehow, despite all its narrative shortcomings, Final Fantasy XV excels at its understanding of maleness.
I think a big part of this is the road trip nature of the game. Sure, theyâre ostensibly on the run and simultaneously on their way to a wedding, but that doesnât prevent The Boys from having a good time. Each boy has a specific personality that is brought out in interesting ways; Ignis cares a stickler for safety and rules, Prompto is energetic and mischievous, Gladiolus is strong and confident and protective of those who are not. Noctis is basically an empty shell, but when heâs interacting with The Boys, there are still good moments to be found.
As you drive through the world, fighting monsters and helping friends, you learn more about these boys and the things they care about. Gladiolus is self-conscious about seeming too caring, but he cares so deeply, especially about his little sister Iris. He recognizes her crush on Noctis and even tricks Noctis into giving her flowers, knowing it would make Irisâ day. Promptoâs lower-class upbringing means heâs tremendously insecure about his relationship with the other boys. Theyâre not aware of how awkward he feels in the presence of people much wealthier and more important than he is, and when he makes it known, they do everything they can to assure him that heâs their brother and they wouldnât have it any other way.
Thereâs something else that Iâve never been able to put into words. Itâs a feeling I have occasionally, and one I cherish. When interacting with most men, thereâs a degree of camaraderie, like, hey, weâre all on the same team, weâre cheering alongside each other, that kind of thing. Thereâs a whole second language that men are only capable of employing with other men thatâs completely nonverbal, but not all men are comfortable using it with each other right away.
There comes a point in a male relationship where everything just sort of clicks. That guy over there is just a man you know, but that guy over there, you and him are mates and youâd fuckin die for each other if you had to. When you do things together, thereâs a sense of rightness and appropriateness to it all. If your best friend asks you to help him carry some groceries in from the car, itâs different than if you help your next door neighbor who you donât really know all that well.
Iâm sure other, better writers have written about this sense of brotherhood. When Iâm playing Destiny with a matchmade team and we roll an enemy squad into a mercy rule defeat, it feels good. When my friends and I trigger the mercy rule against the same thing, itâs like, heck yeah, these are the men who mean the most to me in this fuckin world and I am so lucky to have them with me.
Final Fantasy XV does its darndest to put this in the mechanics. The boys res each other during battle. They all have unique combo moves that play off each other. The battle barks are all designed to make you feel like⌠hell yeah, these are my bros, we kick ass together.
How many games just have two dudes talkin about dude things together? How many games are like âyeah, bro, letâs go running in the sand and whoever outruns the other is the winner!â How many games get that great banter is affectionate? How many games are willing to have a bunch of dudes who love each other and will die for each other whose relationships deteriorate over time but they come back from them stronger than ever?
There are a lot of stories about men in games, but very few stories about being a man.
Final Fantasy XV might be the best of âem.
And itâs still⌠dumb and flawed at times. I think I wouldâve liked a more interesting protagonist and central conflict. I think the game is at its best when youâre cruising around a big, open world, humming about chocobos. I think Square had the opportunity to make a huge, incredible game about an adventure and they wasted it on a game that gets progressively linear (in a bad way) over time. I mentally checked out by the end of the game. I didnât care that some random giant dude showed up, I beat the shit out of him, and then I had to fight a couple more dudes just like him, and then after beating them into submission too⌠we, uh, killed the guy who was stalking us the whole game? Why would I connect with random giant ghost kings when I spent the entire game playing alongside my brothers? Instead they get knocked out and fall asleep on the floor and I have the ending I was always destined to have.
Man, fuck destiny.
The game is great when itâs being personal, but it sucks when itâs trying to do all this other stuff. There are no affectionate moments between Noctis and Lunafreya. Mister Badguy, whose name I forgot and donât feel like looking up because fuck that guy, he was boring, has to exposit his backstory (i was gonna be king but then i didnât get to be king so i decided to have my revenge in like 2000 yearsâ time! mwahahaha!!! here is my entire personal history!) instead of just being interesting on a dramatic level.
Itâs bad when itâs trying to be a grandiose RPG. Itâs great when itâs doing something I canât think of any other game doing before. I think you should play the first 8 or 9 chapters of the game. I think everyone should. Thatâs where the fun lies.
What about the gameplay?
The gameplay is kind of neat. Some stuff doesnât feel nearly as good as other modern open-world games (like, uh, driving, which is kinda terrible and inconsistent about when it lets you drive, and interrupts your drive in really annoying ways at night, but the attention given to things like âneeding to fill up with gasâ is really cool).
Other stuff is clearly channeling How JRPGs Work, which is cool. The way the game gives you XP or deals with magic and abilities feels Very Classically JRPG. But itâs all wrapped up in a real-time action game thatâs nowhere near as satisfying as Dragonâs Dogma or Ninja Gaiden or something. Iâm not saying it has to be, but holding down a button and watching your character autoattack isnât very fun. Zipping around with your teleport power is totally awesome though.
Magic is super strong and I probably shouldâve used it more, but I was never really in love with crafting it. The leveling grid is kinda cool, but I have no idea how, when I did nearly every quest in the game, someone is supposed to unlock some of those skills. It just doesnât seem possible considering the gameâs content.
Quest design isnât great; most of itâs just random fetch quests. The open world itself is nice most of the time, especially when you have a chocobo, but because the gameâs so invested in making you feel like youâre on a road trip, you end up doing a lot of driving which a more generous fast travel system would have avoided, which means you end up seeing a lot of the same places over and over again, which kinda kills the whole road trip vibe.
And So it Ends.
Thereâs DLC. I never did that. I kinda soured on the whole epic journey by the end because of how boring the solo stuff was, and the DLC appears to be all solo stuff. Sorry, but the overall narrative and the gameplay just isnât there. Thatâs not what makes FFXV good. The camaraderie is. The vibes are. Listening to the sizzle of ignisâ cooking or watching a huge monster fly in from above. There are so many incredible moments in this game. Itâs too bad the narrative and the combat couldnât keep up.
I think FFXV benefits and suffers from being a big 3D real-time game. A lot of classic JRPGs are 2D affairs where you have to communicate everything purely through text boxes. FFXV has the benefit of voice and physical performance, adding a huge layer of nuance and personality to its characters, their wants, and needs. But because itâs a big, bombastic 3D game, it canât help itself, and wastes time with boring, endless set pieces that look cool but do little else.
Could I recommend it? I dunno.
But it kinda makes me want to try other JRPGs, even though thereâs really nothing else like it out there.
A while ago, I read something that confirmed a suspicion Iâve held for a long time: video games are great for people who deal with chronic pain. It was relieving to learn that I wasnât doing anything unhealthy or wrong; I was managing my own pain the best I could, and I wasnât alone in doing it.
A physical therapist, back when I could afford one of those, told me that people experiencing the kinds of pain levels I do end up devoting around 95% of their attention to pain, and dealing with it either requires medication, physical therapy, or a way to get our mind off things. The great beauty of video games is that, because they require action, they occupy more of your brainspace, which means you can focus on them for a while, and not on the swirling, shifting mess of pain throughout your bodyâs muscles. Games are a wonderful escape.
Unfortunately, action is a double-edged sword. While itâs great for diverting attention away from pain, it can have the unhappy side effect of exacerbating pain too. I talked about this at length in my Dark Souls and Disability piece; if you want to understand more about my illness or what itâs like to live in my skin, thatâs a great place to start. The short version is that, hey, some games, especially those with a lot of repetitive interactions or high-stress gameplay, put a great deal of strain that my chronic pain and chronic fatigue issues canât handle.
I donât play many competitive games anymore. I used to love it; I put over 100 hours into Battlefield: Bad Company 2 back in the day, and I could routinely show up in the top 3 players of every 32-player match. As my health got worse, I stopped playing competitive games, but I still enjoyed the social elements of online games; since my health isnât getting medical attention and I canât afford good food, Iâm spending a lot of time indoors. Most of my friends are online, and itâs fun to hop into games with them. Makes things less lonely.
One of the biggest blessings in games over the past few years has been the advent of online, service-based, co-op games. Previously, I really only had access to games like Halo, which are awesome in co-op, but you can replay the entire game in a single sitting with friends. Kinda hard to play that stuff daily. Enter Warframe.
Warframe is a free to play game where you, a space ninja, travel around the solar system through missions with randomly-ordered rooms, on a quest to collect all the cool space ninja outfits and weapons you can find. Each space ninja outfit, the titular âWarframe,â is like a hero in a hero shooter. Thereâs Trinity, for instance, who can heal her friends and give them energy to fuel their abilities. I really like Frost, who can create a big dome of ice thatâs useful for protecting targets. Everyone has a favorite frame; my buddy Cameron loves running Nova, for instance, because of her immense potential as a glass cannon. But for me, my absolute favorite frame is one thatâs perfectly balanced between awesome design and tremendous power.
Her name is Ember.
Sheâs such a cool design, built like a powerful warrior with a mohawk. Her powerset is based around fire. You can throw fireballs, coat enemies in something that makes them take more heat damage, leave a huge well of flame on the ground, or cast âworld on fire,â an ability that targets everyone around you within a specified range, one at a time, setting them on fire briefly. Add on the Firequake augment, which guarantees knockdown on any enemy it hits, and you get one of my favorite abilities in a video game ever⌠or, well⌠it was.
The beauty of an online, service-based game is that thereâs always something to do, always something new to try. Thatâs what makes them fun. You canât simply exhaust all the content there is, because the developers are always adding to the game. Unfortunately, this makes it hard to develop mastery over gameplay you enjoy, and if you find something you really like doing, the developers can change it on a whim, robbing you of the thing you enjoy and replacing it with an inferior version.
Like this:
Ember is the original damage caster frame, offering low survivability in exchange for high offense. Her ultimate, World on Fire, is unmatched in terms of widespread lethalityâââwhile many Warframes specialize in certain mission types, Emberâs specialty is âanything under level 30â. By simply bullet jumping through levels with World on Fire active, enemies become a non-factor, making Ember a ubiquitous pick across most of the Star Chart. Like a mobile Resonating Quake, this monopoly on kills can leave squadmates struggling to keep up, in an attempt to see the enemy before they melt. These changes increase lethality at higher levels, while addressing the abilityâs huge range.
World on Fire will continue working similarly to how it does now, but with changing effects over time. The gradually increasing energy cost should encourage most players to toggle the ability when needed, instead of the current âset and forgetâ approach. Players who can afford to run the ability at max charge may need to get more up close and personal, but the increased damage should help Ember out against higher level enemies. World on Fire is still very capable of clearing rooms and sweeping hallways, but should now be applied more deliberately!
This is one of the most saddening design changes I have ever read.
Hereâs the thing: most frames require a lot of really active interaction to play well. Like, hey, if you want to play Valkyrie, Rhino, or Excalibur, youâre going to spend a lot of time clicking furiously with your mouse or tapping on your keyboard to make the most of their abilities. I love Valkyrie so much, but I canât play her well these days. If you want to play a less active frame, youâve got options like Hydroid, who isnât really that fun to playâââyou can turn into a slow-moving puddle or summon a really small field of tentacles that does hardly any damageâââor Nekros, who⌠well, same thing. A lot of the less active frames arenât really that fun to use, or, like Limbo, can be straight-up infuriating to your teammates (Limboâs whole deal is banishing players to another dimension, making it a pain in the ass to loot things, and in a looter shooter, this isnât fun; I love the frame, but I hate making my teammates feel bad).
So along comes Ember, with World on Fire, a really nice offensive ability that isnât great at damage on higher levels, but can help slow down crowds a bit through the power of Firequake. With an absurd range, sheâs really good at thinning crowds. Not as great for burst damage as Nova, not as immensely powerful as Banshee, she still made Warframe really, really dang fun to play.
And more importantly, out of all the frames I played, nobody was as disability-friendly as Ember.
Ember gained a reputation as the âAFK-frame.â The friend who introduced me to her did so by calling her that. You could max out World on Fire, toss in Firequake and max out your energy capacity, press the button in a defense mission, and sit back and watch the fireworks. Or, heck, you could alt tab, browse reddit for a few hours, and still come away with 300+ kills, occasionally hopping back in to top up on energy.
Thatâs obviously a problem for able-bodied players; game design is the art of motivating players to take action, and Ember was really good for motivating players to do⌠well, literally nothing.
But me, I like playing Warframe. I like being active. Thereâs just only so much button-pressing I can do in a day. For an active player like me, World on Fire was great; Iâd do my best to keep her topped up on energy, the thinned-crowds meant I never had to be super super super precise with my movements or result to panic-smashing my weapon triggers or ability to survive. She was, in every way, the perfect frame for someone with chronic pain and chronic fatigue problems.
She let me feel useful.
With the nerf, Ember becomes a much, much more active frame. You have to rove around the map constantly, because you have to seek out energy way more, and because your range is awful nowâââseriously, visually it looks like Iâm maybe casting at sub-10 meters, which isnât great in a game where you can cover like 30â40 meters in a single leap.
Ember was fun. She was relaxing to listen to (seriously, just turn on WOF and let the soothing explosions take you away). She was useful. She was fun. Sheâs much less so now. I still play her because, like I said, itâs fun to listen to her, but the magic is gone. I came back to Warframe for a bit to pick up some primes that had released since I stopped playing, and because Iâm excited to try out ship to ship combat, but the thrill just isnât there these days.
I replayed some Halo with a friend the other day. Itâs not service-based, and itâs only two player, but you know what? Nobodyâs added anything new to Halo in 16 years. Nobodyâs changed anything. No one ever stepped in and went âyou know what? The pistol is too powerful, weâre nerfing it.â If I want to play that stupid, overpowered, godlike, wonderful, amazing pistol, I can do it any day of the week. Itâs fun as hell.
I get why the changes to Ember happened, but itâs a harder game for me to play now. Itâs a game I feel less useful in. Iâve never found another frame I really clicked with. Ember was perfect for me. She was a frame that worked. Warframe isnât a game I can block the pain out with; itâs a game I have to play despite the way it exacerbates my pain, unless I want to play frames I simply do not enjoy. The only fire and forget offensive frame now is Octavia, and like⌠sorry, I donât like her. I donât like her design, I donât like her ability, and I hate listening to her droneâs music. Sheâs one of the only frames I didnât bother to track down because she just isnât the frame for me.
I actually bought a few big Warframe bundles over the years. Out of all the games I chose to spend money on, Warframe was one of the ones I was always happy to put my money towards. Now? I bought some platinum when it was super cheap, but the enthusiasm is gone. I think Iâm done spending money on Warframe. Iâm less likely to come back for more. I loved supporting Digital Extremes in the past, but I mean, whatâs the point of playing a game when the designers make it harder to enjoy?
I know Iâm just one guy, but it was nice playing a game that felt like there was something for everybody. Now thereâs something for everybody but me.
Everyone has their pile of shame, those games that everyone expects you to have played but, for whatever reason, you havenât. Other than computer game demos from Maximum PC or the occasional game at a friendâs house, I didnât get to play video games, so I missed a lot of games, which means that for me, that pile of shame includes so many classics, like Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario Bros. 3 because I grew up without games. Until recently, it also included a little game called Resident Evil 4.
I know gaming articleâs about oneâs past arenât that interesting; we all have a past, we all have a history with games, how we got to the game and why is often less interesting than the game itself. But⌠this time, itâs directly relevant.
One of the earliest debates about gaming I can recall being involved in was a debate about controls. Some friends argued that bad controls were designed intentionally and made the games better, because imprecise, awkward controls made games scarier. Other friends argued that if a gameâs controls were what made it scary, then the game itself wasnât that scary at all. Resident Evil games were frequently brought up in this discussion, and because they werenât available at all on the only gaming platform I had the ability to play for years, I had no reason to try them.
It wasnât that I intentionally tried to avoid them--Iâm of the belief that you can learn something from every game, so Iâll play anything once--it was just that there were other games that appealed to me more, so when it came time to choose a game, the other game usually won out over Resident Evil games. Because I rarely jump into the middle of a series, I gave the original Resident Evil remake a try, but even with the shinier graphics, the controls just didnât do it for me; I didnât connect with the game at all.
It turns out that Iâm one of the people who thinks bad controls prevent a game from being good. I grew up with PC games, which had much more intuitive control schemes than many console games. Those PC games were either designed for a mouse cursor, like Age of Empires and The Oregon Trail, or used a simple WASD key and mouselook aiming system, which is the ideal way to play shooters. Intuitive control schemes come almost naturally to the PC; once Quake and Marathon shipped with WASD, that was that. Everyone started using it.
Many of my console friends grew up with things like the bizarre, three-handled N64 controller, or the Playstation Controller, which didnât have any joysticks. Heck, some of my friends even loved the weird Fisher Price-style monstrosity that is the Gamecube controller. In fact, they swear by it. Resident Evil 4 was designed for that controller.
But more on that later.
Having grown up on PC controls, I developed a specific taste in controls, which can be summarized like this: controls should be invisible.
Thatâs it.
In film, thereâs this idea that editing should be invisible. Walter Murch, one of the worldâs greatest film editors, argued that if you were paying attention to the edits, they werenât doing their job. With the advent of non-linear editing software, it got a lot easier to edit movies, which meant that people started putting a lot more of them in their films because they could, which means you end up with disorienting scenes like this scene in Taken 3. What should be a simple shot or two of Liam Neeson jumping a fence becomes a disorienting mess.
Controls work the same way. They exist to take thought and turn it into action. When we walk, we donât think about it; we just do it. Fine motor skills are a part of basic human biology; think âgrab,â and you grab. You donât have to think about which neurons to fire, which muscles to pull, and so on; your hand simply grabs when you want it to. Video game controls work much the same way; if you have to think about how to move more than you might as a person, the experience often becomes a jumbled, frustrating mess.
(In the case of QWOP, thatâs exactly the point.)
The human brain is great at filtering out unnecessary information, and it gets better as it ages. We donât have to think about inhaling and exhaling or manually turn our eyeballs towards the source of a surprising sound; we just do it. Sometimes, our brains are too good at filtering out information; itâs why you might start idly looking for some milk in the refrigerator while thinking about bills, stare right at it, and miss it; your brain was filtering out the milk and focusing on the more prominent task.
Most video games exist to replicate some human behavior in a virtual environment. That experience might be extremely abstract, like The Oregon Trail, where players click a button to proceed and watch a little wagon trundle across the prairie, or it might be more simulation oriented, like Red Dead Redemption, where players have to steer horses by the reigns, getting them to slow down and speed up as necessary. Whatever the case may be, a game is always taking human behavior and simplifying it, boiling it down, to make sense on a controller. The closer a game gets to real-world actions, the less players want to have to think about it.
Intuitiveness becomes more relevant as fidelity increases.
Originally, I didnât want to write an essay about Resident Evil 4 and the controls, because Iâve talked about it in conversations and on twitter and my Resident Evil 4 streams so much. Part of me wants to talk about how great the encounter variety and pacing are--and they are good--but Resident Evil 4 has been thoroughly surpassed in its encounter and enemy variety by games like Dead Space 2 and Gears of War 3, and neither one of those games are plagued by the frustrating quick time events, bizarrely-paced cutscenes, or nonsensical story of RE4. The boss fights in Resident Evil 4 are great, sure, but Binary Domainâs are the best, and I prefer some of Resident Evil 5âs boss fights in co-op to Resident Evil 4âs.
I keep coming back to RE4âs controls. Some friends have argued that Resident Evil 4 was designed to be played with its awkward control scheme, that itâs a great game because the control scheme was designed intentionally (name a game with unintentionally designed controls, please?), that they somehow ratchet up the tension because moving isnât easy. The theory goes that all the tension of the game would be destroyed if the game were to have a more conventional control scheme.
I generally like to leave people to their opinions, but this time, Iâm just gonna say it: these people are wrong. They are wrong in the strictest, most absolute sense of the word. Theyâre making excuses because they love the game and donât want to admit that it could be even better than it is. But it could be. Oh boy, it could be. And Iâm going to prove it.
Once upon a time, a company called Nintendo made video game consoles. Nintendo is great in a lot of ways, but they do one thing that I think is A Major Problem: they try to make every console ânewâ in some way, usually in regards to control schemes.
I donât think this makes for better games.
Nintendoâs whole deal is like, hey, they wonât make something unless they can do it in a new way; I think people who wonât do something unless they can do it Extremely Well make more interesting process. Nintendo is more about innovation for innovationâs sake. Itâs one of the reasons we donât have a new F-Zero; developers at Nintendo have said that they wonât make a new one unless they can revolutionize it. That approach is why the latest Starfox games have been terrible and we got Metroid: Other M.
Nintendo seems to think this is why they succeed, so, with every generation, they work on a new control interface and try to get people into their games, but, in all honesty, I donât think this is why their games work. Take Super Mario Galaxy, for instance. There is nothing about that game that couldnât be done with a traditional controller. You can play it on a gamepad in the Dolphin emulator if you want right now. Super Mario Galaxy is great because an extremely experienced team of developers made the game theyâre the best at making; itâs not great because of the Wiiâs controller.
Innovation for innovationâs sake is how you get pickle and telephone-flavored ice cream; itâs not great. Itâs also how you wind up with things like the N64 controller, which also isnât great.
âOkay, Doc, so whatâs wrong with quirky controllers? Havenât you seen the cool unique control games that show up at GDC every year?â
Well, the big thing is that quirky controllers tie games to hardware, and the problem with hardware is that itâs much more difficult to replicate than software. Once the hardware stops being manufactured, you lose the software. People can fix ancient games and make them work again on the PC, but a lot of stuff, like old light gun games, rely on technology that simply doesnât exist anymore. Itâs much harder to preserve those games.
At some point in the future, itâs going to be extremely hard to play old Nintendo DS games, because carts are failing and the dual-screen console only has X number of viable units made, and those units are going to decay over time. Emulators arenât an ideal way to play DS games. Eventually, itâs going to be impossible to get a working DS and play a DS game, and so many wonderful games will be lost to time.
When you lock a game to hardware that isnât standardized in some way, like your average 16-18 button controller, you run the risk of putting an expiration date on your game, which brings me to the GameCube.
Now, look, some people really like the GameCube controller. They do. I think theyâre nuts, because most of the buttons are really mushy, especially the bumper, and that right stick is awful. The build quality on these things is terrible too; it took me forever to find a good, working GameCube controller because I kept finding busted ones.
The GameCube controller was great for the year of our lord 2002, when nobody but Bungie and Free Radical knew how to design 3D game control schemes for a controller (borrowing from the PCâs âleft stick to move, right stick to aimâ with a hefty dose of auto-aim, natch!). If you go back and play a lot of old games, many of them, especially ones with free aim, donât hold up. Thatâs why so many old console games had some form of z-targeting--nobody knew how to make it work, so they relied on a less interesting form of gameplay until people figured out how to make aiming work.
The standard control scheme sucks on a GameCube controller.
Like, it is the worst thing, mostly because that right stick isnât great and the buttons are mushy as heck⌠which brings me to Resident Evil 4. Look, RE4âs fans are right when they say that the game was designed with its controls in mind, but they forget that those controls were designed with the GameCube controller in mind.
Resident Evil 4 was released on the GameCube in January 2005, came out on the PS2 in October 2005, was re-released on Windows in the spring of 2007, hit the Wii a few months later, hit Zeebo in like 2008, and finally hit âstandardâ HD consoles in 2011. Resident Evil 4 is designed for the GameCube controller, or, put another way, itâs designed to take into account the limitations of the controllerâs odd setup. One example of this is how the right stick goes mostly unused.
Like I said before, in a traditional game, the left stick moves you, and the right stick aims y ou. Itâs one of those âthis is so simple Iâm surprised no one figured it out soonerâ things, but Iâm a PC gamer, and weâve been doing this in games sinceâŚ
A Mac game.
...wanna guess who developed the Mac game?
âWas it Bungie, the guys who developed the modern control scheme for shooters that makes Halo 1 feel so wonderfully ageless, even to this day?â
Yes.
Yes it was.
In 1994, Bungie created the first free-look game with marathon. Move with the keyboard, look with the mouse. Other games had some form of free-look, the earliest one probably being Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (by Looking Glass Studios, the most important developers of all time, back in 1992).
Anyways, this idea of keeping all movement on one input and all aiming on another input is something we take for granted now, but 11 years after Bungie figured it out, and 4 years after Bungie made it work on a console, Capcom wasnât able to take advantage of it because the GameCube Controller is kind of Super Garbage.
In a modern game designed for an Xbox 360 or other standard layout controller, like Dead Space 2 or Gears of War 3, player movement is responsive; both games pretend to have bulky, slow characters through their animations, sounds, and particle systems (just try slamming Marcus into cover and watch how dust puffs off the wall in response), but the games both respond really quickly to player input. Think it and it happens.
More importantly, you can strafe.
This was a source of some confusion for my friends, so I want to be clear: strafing in video games is just sidestepping. In first person games, if you press the A or D keys, you step to the side. In third person games, some people take âstrafingâ to mean âsidestepping while aiming,â but in a first person game, youâre always aiming, so I donât think thatâs a requirement.
In Gears of War 3, if you push left on the stick, your character moves left. If you push right on the stick, he moves right. The camera itself stays looking the direction you were looking, and if you pull the left trigger to aim your gun, your aim will snap in that same direction. You aim with the right stick and you move with the left stick, handily dividing inputs in a way that makes perfect, intuitive sense for all players.
Modern third-person AAA shooters almost universally work this way, and itâs great, because it lets you focus on playing the game instead of managing the camera. This control scheme isnât 1:1 human-perfect simulation, but itâs doing its best to feel like human movement even when it isnât. We can turn much more quickly than a controller stick can turn our cameras, for instance.
But then thereâs Resident Evil 4.
In Resident Evil 4, when you push the stick to the left, Leon doesnât go anywhere, he just spins. The right stick moves the camera, but it snaps back to wherever Leon was facing. If you hold the right stick and then pull the trigger, Leon will snap aim in that direction, but you have to hold it down. And, again, no matter what, Leon wonât move from his spot unless you press forward or backward on the stick.
So, imagine that there is an enemy behind a pillar in front of you. He doesnât know youâre there, so he hasnât moved. In Gears of War 3, you simply hold left on the stick, move over a few inches, pull the left trigger to aim, and fire, getting a nice, juicy headshot.
In Resident Evil 4, you push the camera to the left, Leon turns to the left, making you lose sight of your target. Then you push the camera forward, then you turn Leon back, and you hope you moved far enough to be able to hit the guy. If you didnât, youâre going to have to keep turning to the left, walking forward, and turning back to hit the guy. Itâs a tedious process of micromanagement that never feels good to play.
Jerking the camera around decreases readability. Readability is everything in a video game. In 99% of all cases, a game can only get better the more readable it is. If youâre constantly needing to orient and reorient yourself for simple, small movements, youâre destroying readability, which means the game is suffering as a result. Clarity is always better. Iâm sure someone will tell me about some little indie game that glitches words all over the screen in an unreadable mess or whatever, and thatâs great if youâre trying to, say, show that a character has dyslexia or something, but you donât want your entire game to be like that.
Itâs interesting to me that a lot of RE4âs fans have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome, arguing that Re4 makes positioning important because it prevents you from moving while aiming, but itâs abundantly clear that this isnât why RE4 is designed this way. The fact is, if you could move while aiming while playing RE4, the camera would constantly be looking in directions you donât want to look when youâre trying to fight, since the camera is tied to the left stick.
You stop moving to aim not because the game is better for doing so, but because the game would be literally unplayable--not in the meme joke sense, but in the strictest, most literal sense possible--if you didnât. The decision to stop the player in order to keep the gameâs readability cascades from the decision to put the camera on the stick, and I think the cameraâs on the left stick because the right stick is the worst stick that has ever existed on any controller in the history of the world.
(...er, that Iâve tried. Iâve tried a lot of controllers and Iâve never used a worse stick than that one, which is why I donât think many people use it in GameCube games)
If Resident Evil 4 had been developed first for, say, the Xbox One, where Iâve been playing Resident Evil 4 lately, I think that not only would the game play a lot better, but Capcom wouldnât have locked players in place to aim.
Itâs worth noting that Mikami didnât stick with RE4âs controls; on The Evil Within, his next horror game, he used that traditional left-to-move, right-to-aim control scheme weâre all familiar with. If Resident Evil 4âs control scheme was so great, why would Mikami have shifted away from it?
(Some folks may argue that TEW is not as good, but this is entirely down to the gameâs encounter design and pacing, which is a separate discussion from its control scheme)
Now, some folks will argue that locking yourself in place makes RE4 a better game. I donât think it will, but Iâm not going to argue that point. I suspect that if you let players strafe when not aiming, locked them into place when aiming, and kept the camera to the right stick only, everyone would like the game more, it would have broader appeal, and even me, a grumpy old curmudgeon, would love it too.
It doesnât help that thereâs a bug in the game where your camera can jerk really far to the left or right when you aim; this wouldnât happen on a typical control scheme, because the bug is tied to the gameâs current camera setup; in a different camera setup, it wouldnât exist.
For proof that this works, check out Resident Evil 5, a game keeps the same kind of tension and horror as RE4, but utilizes a more modern control scheme. Or look at the upcoming Resident Evil 2 Remake, which lets you move while aiming, which lets Leon strafe like a normal person, and all that jazz, but looks way more tense than RE4.
Why might Resident Evil 2 be more tense than 4 while 5 is less tense? All four games are slow, methodical experiences, but 5 is framed as a big, wacky action co-op game. It predominantly takes place in a bright, outdoor environment with a happier sound design and goofy monsters. Resident Evil 4 takes place in a spooky castle or creepy village, largely at night.
Resident Evil 4âs controls never made it creepy; the game featured a giant robot statue that chased Leon through a corridor. Was that frightening because you had to pass quicktime events to successfully escape? No. Of course not. The fear of Leon being crushed is what made it scary.
Resident Evil 2 Remakeâs controls look like theyâll be relatively invisible, but the game looks so much scarier than Resident Evil 4 because the context of the game is so much scarier. The demo for Resident Evil 2 Remake is set in the claustrophobic, impossibly dark corridors of a police station. In each situation, itâs the environment and the art that determines how scary a game is.
There are so many ways to make a game scary. Start with context: youâre trapped somewhere with something that wants to kill you. Then make it dark; humans are survival-oriented creatures who rely on knowledge to survive. Darkness limits our knowledge, and our lizard brains know to be fearful when we canât see whatâs out there watching us. If we know weâre being hunted but we donât know where weâre being hunted from, weâre gonna start to get scared.
Once youâve done that, give players a way to fight back; if all they can do is run, then theyâll stop worrying about how to fight it. Make sure the way to fight back comes with its own risks--guns are better than swords in a horror game. I was a lot happier playing RE4 when I realized how powerful the knife was than when I was dreading running low on ammo. Uncertainty is what makes horror work; if you know that youâre going to find the bullets you need, or that your attack wonât bring more enemies, or that you wonât miss your enemy, you wonât be scared. The more uncertainties you face, the scarier the game becomes.
Resident Evil 2 looks like it checks all these boxes. Controls never really factor into it; Resident Evil 4âs relative unreadability doesnât make it a better game. Its greatness comes from that wonderful encounter variety. It comes from seeing a thing and going âah, okay, I need another thing to pull this off.â Working out How To Complete An Encounter is what makes Resident Evil 4 fun. Having Mike fly in with a helicopter and destroy all the zombies is what makes Resident Evil 4 fun.
Unlocking Ashleyâs giant suit of armor in Resident Evil 4 is hilarious and wonderful; this game is brilliant at things like that. Apparently, you can get certain rewards for completing encounters in specific ways, like clearing out the guard towers before Mike does. Thereâs a lot of cool stuff that you can unlock for playing the game or its side missions, and I really love that about Resident Evil 4.
When Capcom released Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, they put the game through a dramatic control rework so it could use the Wiiâs unique motion controls. Some players consider this the definitive version of the game. As someone with chronic pain, motion controls really donât work for me. But I do find myself wondering what would happen if Capcom reworked Resident Evil 4âs controls to be more like what RE2makeâs appear to be. I suspect people would be surprised at how well it works.
Resident Evil 4âs brilliant level and encounter design makes it scary. Hearing the regenerators is scary. Running low on shotgun ammo or being flanked by guys you didnât see because you were trying to save Ashley is scary. Turning the camera to the left and losing sight of the guy you want to shoot is not so scary.
I might write a second piece about the game, focusing on the specifics of its encounter design; I still prefer the actual pace and variety of Gears of War 3 and Dead Space 2, but thereâs something unique that Resident Evil 4 does with its level structure that I havenât quite figured out how to talk about.
Thank you to David and Dillon for making me finally get this game off my backlog. Next up, Metroid Prime.
Hi, Bungie folks, Iâm Doc. You recently released the Warmind DLC. I recently played it. Iâm writing this blog post now for two reasons: one, Iâm obligated to write content for my readers, and two, because in another, healthier life, people paid me to help them make their games better. Iâm not gonna pretend to be The Greatest Person Ever, but I do have a knack for helping developers, especially when it comes to online shooters.
Sure, Iâm not some famous streamer or YouTuber who drives people to your games, and Iâm not some universally beloved game designer like Shigeru Miyamoto. Iâve worked on games nobody will ever know about. Iâve worked on games everyone loves, and in the process, Iâve played and studied service based games more than just about anyone else out there. I want to help, because Bungieâs games have been good to me, and because I think they still can be.
Iâm not gonna talk about Destiny 2 or how I felt about it or whether itâs good or bad or whatever. Iâve done that already. For the sake of my blog-reader-types, Iâve written about Destiny 2 for USGamer (part 1 and part 2), but Iâm gonna assume you didnât, and Iâm not gonna ask you to sit down and read like 8,000 more words on Destiny 2 right now.
The tl;dr is this: Destiny 2 wasnât as beloved as it could be. Bungie has, admirably, worked their asses off to make Destiny 2 a better game, and I think theyâve done a really good job, but I think thereâs some areas where Destiny 2 could improve. There was a lot of hope for Warmind, and a bunch of the changes--the go fast and exotic updates especially--have done an amazing job at making Destiny 2 feel better to play. Exotics sucked before, and exotics are in a better place now.
Thereâs two kinds of feedback I can provide. Thereâs universal feedback and personal feedback. I want to try to do the former, because look, while personal would make the game more fun for me, it might not bring other people back.
(I started to write some and it went like: âLook, none of my Hunter gear has any mobility perks on it and yet I somehow have like 6 mobility on my guy. Everything is specced for armor and recovery but somehow I still have mobility onâ or âyou guys should really patch the physics glitch back into Crotaâs End because that man cannon launch will never not be funâ)
Fixing my wants makes Destiny a better experience for me, but it doesnât rope in new players or bring back old ones. This is more of a universal feedback type article thing.
Historically, I spend a lot of time writing really lengthy articles for casual readers. I go in-depth into setup because Iâm trying to help people who might not know stuff learn the basics. My journalisty stuff is meant to educate and entertain. This is meant to be more, lean, respectful of time, blah blah blah. Buuuttt⌠since itâs unsolicited feedback, I donât have any kind of report parameters, briefings, âwhat weâre aware ofs,â or stuff like that. So Iâll try to keep it succinct and try to avoid unnecessary explanations.
Okay, that was all setup; the actionable stuff starts here.
A big problem facing D2 right now is the fans. I mean, theyâre great people. I love âem to pieces. But fans are usually, uh, not informed about game development, which means theyâll tell you what they think they want, and you have to listen to that and do your best to interpret it, which is a huge problem for basically every developer Iâve ever interacted with in any way, shape, or even tweet.
Like, âwe want a better grind,â for instance. That sounds really simple, right? What does âbetterâ mean, though? Iâve heard some people say that getting rewards is too easy. Iâve heard other people say that getting meaningful rewards seems impossible. Thereâs a ton of different ways we can interpret this desire for a better grind.
Warmind promised that. You folks at Bungie changed how difficulty works, how engrams drop, where the soft cap was, and a bunch of other stuff. You know all about that. But the folks online are still upset, and the discussion seems more confused than ever.
So, all we know for sure is that people didnât like the grind before and they donât like the grind now. Okay, cool, but what do they like? Or, better yet, how can we move the grind to a place where theyâre happy?
First things first, making the grind a bit longer was absolutely the right call. Having exotics dumped all over you makes rewards feel meaningless. Getting legendaries all the time? Same deal. So making those things rarer, thatâs a really good first step, but there are still three fundamental problems with the grind.
Problem #1: The soft cap. Itâs weird to do a 350 difficulty event and only get 342 gear for it. Whatâs the point, you know? Why run these strikes that are super challenging--like, in some cases, LASO-levels of challenging--and get literally nothing of value for it? Whatâs the fun in doing it? Iâm not gated by How I Play, Iâm gated by the Weekly Reset. Itâs weird to be told âstop playing now, you canât make any forward progress.â
Some of the most fun I ever had was in Archonâs Forge in Destiny. Iâd constantly jump into that with friends. Sure, it sucked that it wasnât a matchmade activity, so we just kind of had to hope that weâd spawn in with another group of players, but it was so fun, and there was no way to play it without making some degree of granular, forward momentum.
This is in part because Rise of Iron had this nice, slow, forward momentum that felt really good until you hit somewhere around 385 or so, a mere 15 light from the cap of 400. You could complete any content in the game at that point, and, as I recall, get those last few levels by doing the PVE raids or Nightfalls or the PVP Trials of Osiris, Shaxx bounties, (and/or Iron Banner).
Destiny 2 has soft caps that make a bunch of content inaccessible. Momentum comes in starts and stops. Iâve done every milestone for the week except crucible (my heart condition makes competitive multiplayer a no-go for me until after my surgery) and the raid (same, but also putting together a team is hard these days) and Iâve⌠gone from, what, 335 to 342? For days now, no progress. There is nothing I can do but wait until reset. Heroic strikes and Escalation Protocol donât feel rewarding at all.
Suggestion: Move the soft cap up to a point where players feel they control their own pacing, while making the level-up process way smoother. Those last ten light levels should be the challenge. Let me make progress on my light every single day of the week until the only thing in my way is the true endgame content.
Problem #2: Activities are unrewarding. For a service-based game to succeed, it needs to reward players for playing. To this end, most service-based games give players loot, of which there are two kinds. The first kind helps you progress, which means completing a collection (Destiny 2 does not have any meaningful way of tracking collection completion) or leveling up (in Destiny 2âs case, thatâs the light system). The second kind changes how you play. After maining hand cannons for so long, Vision of Confluence, a scout rifle, changed everything for me. It felt rewarding not just because it was a joy to use, but because it tangibly impacted my power level and changed how I played Destiny. If you want to make loot rewarding, it needs to fill one of these criteria; if you want people to fall in love, it needs to fill both.
Weâve already talked about the soft cap issue and the lack of smoothness and player involvement in their own progression, but if all I ever get are slightly more powerful blue-tier guns, Iâm going to shard all of them in disappointment. Itâs why âtwo tokens and a blueâ became such a meme. Itâs why two of my friends ragequit Destiny 2 the other day. Theyâre tired of getting blues.
So, whatâs the solution? Fewer blues? More purples and exotics? Nah, itâs deeper than that.
When I get loot now, I do one of two things. If itâs blue, I shard it. If itâs purple, I check the light level, and if it wonât raise my light, I shard it. If it does, I infuse it. I donât keep anything anymore. Iâve found some guns I like, but truth be told, I could break down most of the guns I have without a worry, because none of them really change the way I play meaningfully. Iâve got Better Devils. I like the way it looks and it does the DPS I need. No legendary hand cannon has come along to change the way I use hand cannons. Ikelos and West of Sunfall 7 are⌠okay? They look cool, I guess?
Back in Destiny, I got this amazing scout rifle that had two complementary perks: firefly, which caused enemies to explode on headshot kills, and triple tap, which added a bullet to the magazine after three critical shots. Not super powerful, but it felt juicy to proc those abilities. It wasnât the only scout rifle I used, of course. On solar burn nightfalls, I went with the awesome, super stable, automatic Vision of Confluence. I had this really fun Cryptic Dragon and Fang of Ir Yut I used.
Not to get into nostalgia, but some of those things had value.
In Destiny 2, most guns have one perk. Once you find a perk you like, you can safely break everything else down. Chances are, even if your favorite perk like, say, Outlaw, once you get a hand cannon with Outlaw, youâll never care about another Hand Cannon with Outlaw. Youâve customized the one you found, itâs been your faithful companion, why would you ever switch to something else? Just infuse it into your old standby.
The single-perk system means that thereâs no chance for perks that combine in pleasing or interesting ways. It would be awesome to--spitballing here--have an auto rifle with a perk that increases damage the longer you hold down the trigger and another perk that grants bonus ammo if the gun is reloaded when the mag is empty. Toss in a third perk that gives you a larger magazine size, and you have a really attractive weapon. Throw out your designer instincts to make the gun less accurate because those perks are powerful; let your players live a little!
Randomization helped a lot. In Destiny, getting new loot was exciting because it was always worth checking to see if you got something good. In Destiny 2, thereâs no possibility to get anything good, because everything is predictable. I have a Valakadyn. There is no point to ever getting another Valakadyn, ever again. I have one. I donât need more.
Consider faction rallies. I participated in one. I got most of the guns I wanted right away, then took forever to hit the cap. When I hit the cap, there was like⌠I think maybe one gun I wanted but didnât get? It was a mind-numbing process of breaking things down, constantly, over and over again. A stream of endless disappointment. Once I got Dead Orbitâs Scout Rifle or Shotgun or whatever, the other 50 didnât matter to me, yâknow? No value whatsoever. Complementary perks would change how I play, and every gun would be way more exciting even if I got bad perks on some of them.
Better to have an active community complaining about balance than a dead community that barely logs on to play your game because they arenât getting guns worth considering.
Suggestion: Honestly, the Destiny system was great. Just do that but add more possible perks. Hell, let players import all their old guns if you really love them. âDonât fix what ainât brokeâ could not be stated more here. In this case, unbreak what was working fine, please? Itâll keep players more invested. Lastly, let players get rewards at every tier. Scale it so that everyone who finishes the DLC has a chance of beating at least 1 wave of Escalation Protocol and getting rewards. Look at how anyone could beat Court of Oryxâs easy rune and get rewards, but only the best teams could beat the hardest runes.
Problem #3: Get some. Get none.
Iâve got this quest. Itâs very simple: I need to complete three Escalation Protocol waves in order to complete. Awesome, right? Well, I tried all day yesterday to get it. Nothing. Part of the issue was matchmaking--this is a super tough thing that requires more than 3 players to complete, but I can only bring 3 players in, so I just have to hope people are willing to play.
Every time I turned it on, people in the area ran away.
Thereâs a problem with your game if people are running away from your content. In the case of Escalation Protocol, itâs because nobody Iâve encountered can reliably get to the first loot drop. With Archonâs Forge, Prison of Elders, or Court of Oryx, similar encounters in Destiny, people actively participated in those because you could always get something for doing it. With Escalation Protocol, you can spend 30 minutes trying to do it and get literally nothing for the effort except your entire fireteam complaining about how we should go play something else because âIâm too pissed off at this binary bullshit.â
Thatâs harsh. I donât want to be harsh, but my friends were noticeably upset. We used to log onto Destiny to have a good time. But when you beat your head against a wall and get nothing for it, whatâs the point? And, like I said above, getting more blues donât count--blues are literally worthless (neither improving your power nor changing the way you play), and getting more legendaries rarely matters, as discussed above. That leaves, what, glimmer? Shaders? None of this fits the all-important âmakes me more powerful or changes how I playâ criteria.
âYou either get something or you donât, and because of this soft cap, itâs never good,â is how my friend put it, when I pressed him.
Games like Warframe address this by giving you resources, then giving you stuff to spend the resources on. Want to build this frame? (think Hunter/Titan/theotherclassnoonelikes, but there are like 50 of them and they have 4 abilities that can be modified in all sorts of insane ways) Thatâll cost you a bunch of specific ingredients.
Suddenly, you find yourself changing things up. Maybe you run a few boss fights, do some derelict survival, fly archwing for a while⌠youâre always getting something, and that something leads to something new, and that something new changes your power or your level.
In Warframeâs case, every single weapon can be raised to level 30. Max out enough weapons, and youâll improve your mastery rank. This rank offers a bunch of perks, which Iâm not gonna get into here. âFormaâ your level 30 weapon, and it starts over at level 1, but now it has more mod slots. The point isnât âhey, do it like Warframe,â itâs âhey, every time you do something in Warframe, you get something, and that something goes towards changing how you play or how much more powerful you become. A non-Formaâd gun might only have room for 4 perks. Forma it enough, and youâll be able to equip 12, which can radically alter how it behaves.
In my hundreds of hours of Warframe time, I always felt like I was making progress. My friends tell me Monster Hunter is the same way; even if you arenât getting what you want grinding one monster, itâs easy to grind another monster. Thereâs always something to do.
With Destiny 2, you either get something or you donât, and, like my friend said, itâs rarely worth the time. I think the exotic masterwork grind is a move in the right direction (though damn, do I wish that there were PVP and PVE requirements for every exotic because I like way too many guns that require me to play Crucible, which I donât enjoy, as a person who prefers cooperative games).
Suggestion: More. Useful. Rewards. The easiest way to do this is just gonna be to do the above suggestion. Thatâll put you back up there with Destiny. To take things even further, Iâd put the masterwork core chase on every gun. Iâd have some sort of âitem collection kioskâ that lets players track every single gun and armor in the game. Destiny let players upgrade all their guns--that was more stuff for players to spend resources on and more resources to farm, which meant more willingness to go to multiple planets and different activities. Itâd be more fun to finish a strike on Venus and get Spirit Bloom and go âoh, heck, I need that, because this gun with these perks I like needs Spirit Bloom to upgrade.â
I mean⌠this sounds bad, but like⌠donât fix what ainât broke, you know? You want to give players something that always feels like it is useful or will be useful in the near future. It doesnât always have to level them up or change the way they play, but it should always promise that one of those two things is just around the corner.
So this is the conclusion time.
âBut, Doc, why not be more imaginative than this?â Because Iâm operating on a couple hours of sleep, am not allowed to drink any caffeine until after my surgery, and because no oneâs paying me to do this. Iâm just up blogging and trying to point more in a general direction than offer any serious, concrete solutions.
Besides, I donât have any insights into how the engine works or what resources the team has or what deadlines theyâre operating on. I donât know whatâs reasonable for you folks at Bungie to do. I know that some of this stuff is piss easy in Unreal Engine 4 or Unity. Heck, I could probably figure out a few of these things in CryEngine or Torque or idTech or Gamebryo or any of the other engines Iâve messed in over the years. So I could hazard a guess, but I mean, Iâd rather go âyou had it figured out alreadyâ and âhereâs what other people doâ than sit down and come up with brand spankinâ new innovative ideas for a developer that might not even read this post, yâknow?
But uhâŚ
Well, this brings me to the surprise problem!
Iâm not really sure this is a problem. The other stuff, I can see it. I know how this stuff works, I know how players respond to problems, I know how to help people fix stuff. I can speak with relative confidence there.
But this, I dunno, itâs rooted in speculation, and that speculation is this: I feel as though Bungie is more interested in reinventing the wheel than perfecting it. Wheels have evolved over time, yâknow? They started out as round things to help ancient humans move stuff around, and eventually people figured out all sorts of things like tires and transmissions and casters and brakes.
The tire evolved. But when I look at the stuff Bungie does, it seems like theyâre more focused on Doing Something New Every Time. Thatâs not necessarily bad, but consider how often people have asked Bungie for a mode like Firefight or Horde, where players face off against waves of enemies for increasing rewards. Bungie has given players Prison of Elders, Court of Oryx, Archonâs Forge, and Escalation Protocol instead. Iâm not going to lie, I like aspects of each of these.
Prison of Elders was great because it had so many unique bosses and random modifiers, but it suffered because there were no checkpoints, you always encountered every race every time, and it was just the same four rooms to fight in. The main issue with Court of Oryx was that there was no matchmaking, so you just kinda had to hope someone might join you in the world, and that didnât happen as often as it should have. Archonâs Forge had the same matchmaking problem as Court of Oryx, but you could only carry one key at a time, instead of being able to carry multiple keys for multiple difficulties. Bungie had keys worked out with Court of Oryx. Why was Archonâs Forge different?
Now we have Escalation Protocol, and there are no keys, but thereâs still the matchmaking problem, with an added ânow you donât get loot for beating a bossâ issue. All three Destiny 1 events gave loot more reliably. Getting axes for skilled play seemed more predictable in Archonâs Forge than the Valkyries do in Escalation Protocol.
It feels like Bungie wants to make something new every time.
Weâve heard people from the Streamer/Youtuber Summit thing whoâve indicated that theyâre not that excited by Bungieâs proposed weapon randomization system. So many of the changes in Destiny 2 seem completely arbitrary. It⌠how do I put this⌠donât replace what ainât broke, folks. We donât need change for changeâs sake. Improvements are better. Like, hey, I hated Exhumed. Thatâs a bad perk. I would have been way happier to see a bunch of new perks than to not have perks at all. Iâd really like to see Prison of Elders or Archonâs Forge make a comeback, but with improvements like more objective randomization and the ability to carry more keys.
Right now, Escalation Protocol feels like the fourth, and least exciting, attempt at something else. Because itâs The Big Endgame Activity of the DLC, I feel like it casts a pall over Warmind.
So thatâs my last suggestion: improve what youâve got. Add onto it. But maybe cut back on the subtraction? Just a little bit?
Hopefully this is helpful feedback. Mostly, players just wanna hop in, feel like they got something done, and log off. Thereâs so much more I could talk about, especially why the challenge system feels flat or how the storytelling could be improved or why Bones of Eao NEEDS to return, but I think this covers the big stuff people are talking about after the DLC.
This fall, I donât know if Iâll be picking up the next Destiny 2 installment. The patches are encouraging, but âthe shooting feels betterâ isnât why I come back to a game, yâknow? Itâs because I want to replay the story or spend time doing cool co-op stuff with my friends. Right now, Destiny 2 has room for improvement.
Video games are weird. So many of them promote a peculiar idea of realism, boasting technological advances in the realms of graphics and physics, but they fall short of the mark. Look at VR, with its much-vaunted sense of presence. Remember how 3D gaming was supposed to be the future for a little while there? All these advances, but when it comes to the act of play, we fall back on those same old gameplay verbs.
My own philosophy for what makes a good game is fairly simple: a gameâs rules and the situations it provides must be mentally stimulating and emotionally engaging. Everything else is negotiable. If a game can surprise and delight its players, itâs done all it needs to do. It is, I think, a freeing goal; everything from Chess to Age of Empires to Gears of War 3 to Night in the Woods is capable of doing this.
Like everybody else, I have preferences for how games should play. A while back, I found myself playing one of those big, bombastic cinematic games, and I was running away from some forgettable peril. The ground shook below me. My character stopped moving, played a stagger animation, and then continued running. Then it happened again.
...and again.
It ruined the excitement somewhat.
In film editing, thereâs this idea called âcontinuity of motion,â which basically means keeping a movement going through a shot. Watch a good car chase movie and look at how the editor keeps your eyes traveling in the same arc as the shots change. A car might leap over a hill to our right and slam down on the highway to the left, and the next shot maintains this motion by showing our driver, on the right, facing left, slamming his head forward with the impact. This gives the scene a sense of flow that audiences tend to find more pleasing than amateurish shots that donât maintain this continuity of motion.
For me, maintaining a sense of fluidity is a must in making a game feel engrossing. Other people may feel different, of course, and there are plenty of games where fluidity doesnât make sense, like a text-based adventure or a 4X strategy game. But in a general sense, I think fluidity is a desirable trait. So, over the years, Iâve developed my aesthetic sensibilities into a complex, gut-driven âthis is how I like âem to feelâ thing that dictates how I think about game design.
But Iâm not sure game designers think the same way.
In the 6th console generation--thatâs the one that started with the Dreamcast and ended with the release of the Xbox 360--3D was still something a lot of people were trying to figure out. Oh, sure, the 5th generation had plenty of 3D games, like Silent Hill and Panzer Dragoon Saga, and there had been rudimentary 3D games before that, but the 6th generation is when a bunch of mainstream console developers really sat down and tried to figure out how to make 3D games work. Itâs a delightful, frustrating era of game design; some games like Halo: Combat Evolved have aged beautifully, while others, like Dead to Rights⌠well, maybe not so much.
Even at the beginning of the 7th generation, there were still plenty of games that didnât feel quite right. As the generation progressed, controls started to become more standardized, games became a lot easier to pick up, and developers started focusing more on the games than the implementation.
Learning from other developers and trying to standardize things is awesome. These days, it would be weird to play a first person shooter where you walked with the mouse and looked with the keyboard. Focusing more on what you are doing than the buttons you press to do those things is awesome. Personally, Iâm of the conviction that a gameâs controls should be as invisible as possible--the player should be able to perform the actions they expect to perform without having to fight controls to do it. Walk forward? Push up on the stick. Jump? Press A.
Because games are interactive, players have to learn how to interact with them; standardizing controls means players can focus more on the act of play than acclimating to a new control scheme, especially if they stop playing a game for a week and come back later, only to find that they have forgotten how to play. Itâs one of the reasons shooters are so popular; nearly all of them have the same controls, and it takes about two seconds to figure out whether a specific shooter uses E or F for the interact prompt.
Okay, what am I driving at? Well, itâs really cool that, as game design has progressed, weâve gotten better at making games that anyone can pick up and play without requiring heavy instruction manuals to figure out. Thereâs still a ways to go, but weâre in pretty good shape, and a lot of this is the direct result of learning from other developers. The easier it is to engage with a game, the easier it is to become engrossed in what the game is trying instead of the inputs.
But thereâs a problem: verbs.
In game design speak, a verb is âthe thing you can do.â In a first person shooter, my verbs include things like âwalk,â âreload,â and âshoot.â Weâre very good at these kinds of verbs. Press W to walk forward. Press R to reload. Click the left mouse button to shoot. Great. These abstract ideas work pretty well because they take uncomplicated human motions and abstract them in such a way that itâs easy to get what the gameâs going for.
As we all know, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When I shoot my gun, a projectile (or raytrace, depending on how the guns were created) comes out and hits the entity I am pointing at. That entity, if it is vulnerable to bullets, is then deleted. This is an abstraction of the idea of shooting something in real life.
Now consider body language.
How, on a generic, industry standard 16-button controller, do you puff up your chest when talking to someone, or square your shoulders, or raise your eyebrows at a friend from across the room to signal that youâve seen them? Why is that so much more complicated than a gun? I mean, thereâs the obvious part: pull a trigger, bullet comes out. A lot of our human interactions are super nuanced, often to the point where theyâre reflecting how we feel.
A friend of mine, a wonderfully talented game designer, once pointed out to me that itâs really hard for a game to understand intent. Itâs very good at understanding action, but intent is a whole other ball game.
When I shoot something with a gun, the game goes âah, well, projectile comes out, projectile hits entity, entity is deleted.â The game understands this. The game is going to have a lot harder time understanding that I am positioning myself between two characters because I want to ensure that one character does not harm the other. It doesnât understand why I behaved the way I did.
I wrote about this a bit when I talked about the witches in Dishonored 2. I killed them because the heart told me how they were child abusers and animal murderers. I killed them because they had magical powers and no one else did, and they relished in murder, and if I didnât stop them, who could? How many innocent lives would be lost because they had fun killing people? So I killed all the witches. Dishonored 2 looked at this and went âan awful lot of people were killed by you in the game. Therefore, you get The Bad Ending that reflects that You Are A Murderer.â
How I viewed the world and how the world viewed me were two different things, and thereâs no really good way for the game to understand that. Itâs why a tabletop RPG is still several orders of magnitude more advanced than a video game RPG; the Dungeon Master understands intent.
But this is only part of the problem. One-third, the way I see it.
Thereâs also the issue of fidelity. Remember, weâre talking about a generic 16-button controller. Heck, even back in the 90s, the designers at id software rightfully understood that just because you have 144 keys on a keyboard doesnât mean you should use all of them. Thereâs only so far you can reach before it just becomes annoying. Bad PC ports often require you to press buttons like I or Enter but leave Caps Lock and Tab unbound. Itâs a pain with one hand on the mouse and the other on WASD. While a PC does have a lot of buttons, practical applications are a lot more limited in scope.
Realistically speaking, how are you supposed to, say, rest your hand on a coffin for a few thoughtful moments, bidding your best friend his final goodbye, before you turn away to meet his grieving father? In video games, the easiest way to do this is to give players a wide variety of specific interactions, but lock them all into one button. Unfortunately, for something as serious as grieving, âPress F to Pay Respectsâ just seems goofy. As if, right? As if you could actually put the full weight of paying respects to someone by something as simple as pressing F. Itâs ludicrous, unless youâre willing to play along.
Finally, thereâs the idea of systems. This oneâs really complex and Iâm super sick right now so Iâm not really going to get into it in depth, but basically: if it happens in a game, itâs probably best if it can happen multiple times, for a lot of reasons. Youâve only got 16 buttons on a controller, after all. A dedicated âpay respectsâ button would be kind of silly in a world where you need two inputs just to look and walk.
Additionally, these things are resource-intensive. Better to have an action that can be repeated rather than one that is completely bespoke, unless youâre a huge AAA developer who can do that sort of thing. Heck, half the reasons cutscenes exist is so devs can do things with a game that canât be done in gameplay. One game Iâve been playing lately has still illustrations accompanied by narration because the gameâs design and camera isnât well suited to some of the ideas the story wants to convey.
So, basically: games donât know what weâre doing unless the developers tell it in advance, and itâs impossible for most developers to anticipate every humanâs intentions when playing the game. Even then, itâs a huge waste of resources to try to anticipate every single character interaction, and youâve only got 16 buttons or so to use, so how would you even implement the mechanics if you had them?
Then youâve got the additional problem of human behaviors that arenât interesting. Most of us donât think about breathing; you probably donât want to make that manual. Males often deepen their voice unknowingly around other males; do we need a game mechanic for that? Iâm all about reassuring people in real life, but do I really need to do that in a video game? Is that worth spending time on?
This leads us to where we are now, an industry with a limited set of âfunâ verbs and tropes. Itâs fun to press a button and make something explode. Itâs less fun to parallel park a car.
So, every year, at E3, when publishers and their marketers reveal exciting new games to the press, a contingent of people who donât understand video games at all begin tweeting up a storm about how itâs a shame there are so many violent games and why arenât there other things? These people generally ignore all the nonviolent games that exist, from Spintires to Frostpunk; itâs easier to get mad than it is to propose alternatives, I suppose.
Curiously, there is one genre that these conversations tend to reference: walking simulators.
A walking simulator is, to put it bluntly, a game with as few verbs as possible. Thatâs why it got the name: you walk around, occasionally solve some light puzzles, and⌠well, thatâs about it. Youâll generally listen to the story as itâs exposited to you through disembodied voiceover while you explore an empty, sterile space.
Iâd like to bluntly suggest that the people who champion walking sims donât understand why humans play games. I think they conflate subject with content. The content of a game is about the verbs you can perform. The subject is all well and good, but if a game little more than an interactive ebook, why bother? The declining popularity of the walking sim--The Chinese Room has shut down and Fullbrightâs Tacoma sales were nothing less than disastrous--is, I think, evidence that people donât really want these experiences.
That doesnât mean they donât want these stories, mind you. I think plenty of people would like the stories these developers are telling⌠but very few are interested in games without a lot of verbs.
(As an aside, I think games criticism in general has an overabundance of critics who have a rudimentary, Literature 101 level understanding of criticism, so they obsess over a gameâs themes the way first-year university students are required to discuss The Lotteryâs themes; this obsession with subject is a tremendous display of critical immaturity--the best critics understand that good criticism isnât just what a thing is about, but how that thing goes about it)
So weâre in a bit of a pickle. A lot of games use verbs--especially violent ones--because the nature of the medium is best suited to simple, violent verbs.
What else can we do?
Well, Iâve been wondering about that for a long time, because⌠how do I put this⌠while I am content to play exciting, violent games, I canât help but feel that maybe weâve settled into a groove of doing whatâs familiar and shirked our responsibility to try new things. Sure, I think itâs stupid that someone would argue that âa game where you walk around really slowly and listen to a narratorâ is anywhere near as compelling as a game where you murder the crap out of space aliens, but you canât just logic feelings away, right? You canât just go âwell, youâre wrong, get out of games if you donât like shooting space aliens.â The proposed âsolutionâ to violent games is idiotic, but the feelings at the root of it all arenât illegitimate.
Last fall, I started thinking about working on something small, to get better at modeling and animation. I had this idea to try to make a bunch of different vignettes. Each vignette would let me try my hand at different things. But it would be boring if I did predictable vignettes; who would care about it? Why would anyone want to try my experiments if they werenât interesting?
So⌠I started thinking about verbs.
The first one was pretty simple: photography. Plenty of games have had photography mechanics, from Pokemon Snap to Gravity Bone, but it seemed like a safe place to start. I thought about learning animations; what if the player was murdered in first person? Players kill in games, and they die in games, but what would it be like to be murdered?
One of my pet peeves is when someone says âyou donât have to do the thing I donât want you to do,â as a way of guilting you out of doing what you enjoy. So, of course, I decided to give the player an assassination sequence. First person driving seemed pretty obvious too, if not that creative.
I wanted to do a sequence where the player was tied up and had to have a conversation, because it annoyed me that people were mad at Deus Ex: Human Revolution for not catering to their playstyles all the time; I wanted a sequence where the player wasnât in control.
There were others. I thought about shaving. I thought about conversation systems. Eating in first person. I probed for ideas on twitter. At some point, I caught the attention of my dear friend Jess. When I explained the project to her, she came at me with a counterproposal: what if we made this. She was more experienced than me. We could get it out in a couple months, make rent, and if it did enough to justify the time we put into it, maybe weâd make more, and sheâd help me learn how to model and texture and stuff, all while, hopefully, we made money.
That project, Sin Titulo, became Sin Voz once I discovered that there was already a critically acclaimed comic book with that name. At some point, Jess decided to call it Paratopia, and we eventually turned that into Paratopic, because I hate the way that â-opiaâ sounds. Itâs too happy.
Some of the ideas made it through. Others didnât. We werenât consciously trying to make the anti-walking sim, it was more that a lot of the initial ideas managed to make it through. We turned it into a narrative--if you pay attention to the gameâs script, you can figure most things out.
Some stuff didnât turn out the way I wouldâve liked--I wanted to introduce the birdwatcher with a sequence where she takes a photo of herself in the mirror at home, then wanders out the back door, through her yard, and into a forest. Some stuff wasnât possible, like the murder sequence being longer and more drawn out. I would have liked the night driving to more closely match my own experiences on a lonely Kansas highway at night--every so often, turning on your blinker to pass one of the only other cars on the road, for instance. Jess really wanted it to be antagonistic. Iâm still somewhat torn on that, but I donât think itâs possible to leave any project completely satisfied with every single atom.
Other stuff took on different forms, because Jess is one of the few creative forces I consider equal to myself. Heck, I believe she originated the gas station, diner, and apartments levels. Two of the three scenes in the diner were initially planned to be elsewhere.
Plenty of ideas just didnât fit, like being torn apart by coyotes or speaking to a gigantic, ancient gunslinger who sat down in a field and wouldnât stop growing. They didnât make it in, and understandably so. Chris brought so much to the project, heâs just as mighty as Jess or I when it comes to great ideas.
Things changed, but I think the end result is a project that a lot of people like because itâs a project thatâs rich with verbs. Some people have called it a walking sim, but not many. Weâre nowhere near as successful as most walking sims with plenty of pedigree, marketing, and a Steam release, but thatâs okay. This is a game about doing things--things you wouldnât normally do in a video game. At least when it comes to my contribution, Paratopic is a game about what else we can do.
As some of you know, Iâm basically gonna die real soon unless I can get heart surgery, but thatâs expensive. I make money by writing essays about games. If you like my work, please share it around, because personally, Iâd like to keep on living. If you wanna support me, Iâve got patreon, ko-fi, and a critically acclaimed game out. Iâm also looking for work as a designer or writer, so if you know of anything, let me know, please? Iâve worked on well over a dozen AAA and indie games doing everything from emergency script rewrites to helping devs improve their investment loops. Iâve put a lot of time into the 29 years of my life so far, and Iâd like it to pay off, lol. But seriously, my mortality is distressing, so if you know how I can get my heart fixed and put a roof over my head, I want to hear from you!Â
Dishonored 2 is one of my favorite games. Iâve written about it at length before. Iâve talked about some of my problems with the game (doing the right thing in D2 feels like an easy choice compared to D1), but I mean, man, I still love it. When it first dropped, though? Man. I had A Problem with it.
Dishonored 2 was so good until I got to the end and got an ending that didnât match up with my feeling of where I was at when playing the game. There I was, being the best Corvo I could be, running around trying to save my daughter Emily, realizing how bad things had got in Karnaca while Iâd been away, and wanting to do my best to keep everyone safe and improve the empire.
At the end, the game told me that Corvo ruled the islands with an iron fist. What had happened? Why was it doing this to me? I didnât ghost every level, but I certainly approached things non-lethally where I could.
Turns out that the game doesnât like it when you kill monsters.
I mean, sure, if you kill, like, a rat, the game doesnât seem to care, but if you kill a witch, the game gets mad. Apparently, the game considers witches to be people. I did not--I felt the game had led me to believe that witches werenât actually people. So when I made the choice to kill them, the game saw it as Corvo choosing the path of violence⌠but thatâs not the decision I made.
Letâs rewind a bit.
One of my favorite story archetypes is about people without power who, through cleverness, ingenuity, and grit, overcome those with power. Itâs not just about being an underdog, itâs about being underestimated, devalued, even downright abused. Itâs about the defiance that comes with that, and overcoming the expectations someone has.
I donât know exactly why, but Iâve always liked these kinds of stories. It frustrated me to watch my wealthier peers pick on the poorer ones. It insulted me when I was essentially told âwow, itâs remarkable that youâre so intelligent for someone so poorâ after I won a scholarship. I had to protect two disabled students from one of the richer students in school because he wanted something they had and they didnât want to give it to him. I have watched people with power hurt and abuse those without. Heck, Iâve been at the mercy of people more powerful than me before. I donât like that. When I can tell someoneâs struggling with the power dynamics of a group, I do my best to help them feel more comfortable in that space.
One thing I liked about the first Dishonored game is that the Empress, Jessamine, is portrayed as a good person who wanted to do right by her people, but she was actively sabotaged, and eventually murdered, by the nobles whose power she threatened. That kind of story is alluring to me; getting justice for Jessamine and delivering Dunwall from the powerful, punching up like that⌠thatâs awesome as heck.
It was kinda weird when Dishonored 2 shows up and indicates that maybe Dunwall didnât actually improve that much after the nobility was killed off/not killed off (I was mostly nonlethal the first time). D2 never really confronts this head on, at least that I can recall. Instead, it feels like two different stories. Thereâs the personal story of âsomeone hurt your family and took your home and you should take it back,â and then thereâs the idea of âyouâre fighting for justice for people who are downtrodden by the people who took your home.â
These are both great, but after the fact, it did seem kinda strange that Corvo, literally the dad of the Emperor, as upper-class as you can get, is playing the part of the underdog (or Emily herself, who I havenât played because I wanted to hear Stephen Russellâs voice again). Like, thereâs this implication that he and Emily havenât really fixed anything at all and maybe kinda betrayed Jessamineâs legacy with that? I dunno. Itâs really the only criticism I have of Dishonored 2 anymore, and I mean, the gameâs still a 10/10 for me. Itâs one of the only games that can grab hold of my attention and actually distract me from the pain Iâm in.
Arkane has done such an amazing job with their games; I get to be someone else for a while. I can block out the health problems for a while and just fall into another space and experience relief from my awful life. I will never be able to thank everyone there for making such pure and wonderful games.
So Dishonored 2 has this kinda odd relationship with privilege and power and how it contextualizes its protagonists, but then along came Death of the Outsider, which solved this problem by letting you play as Billie Lurk, who, for my money, is the best protagonist in Dishonored history. I love playing as Billie. I love that sheâs not an upper class person, just a normal person with cool tools and powers.
Anywho, back to the violence.
So, one thing I love about Arkane games is that they have amazing gamefeel. Itâs like saying a drink is smooth, right? Like, it just feels right. Iâve never played an Arkane game that felt bad (maybe Arx Fatalis does, but Iâve never played it!), and I feel like, with every successive release, they only get better at making great gamefeel. Buuuuuuttt⌠it feels like since Dishonored, every Arkane game is a test. You canât just do what feels good; youâre taking a test.
When the witches came along, Iâm not gonna lie, it felt good to let loose. Theyâre just as powerful as I am, so itâs not like itâs an uneven playing field.
But⌠that wasnât my first reaction. Iâd encountered the witches before in The Knife of Dunwall and The Witches of Brigmore, and theyâre portrayed in those games as unequivocally bad. Still, for Dishonored 2, I was trying to play stealthy and nonlethally, so I decided to knock them out at first. When I found out I could take their powers in one mission, I decided to try that, and then figured that when Corvo stopped Delilah, heâd probably arrest them or something.
Then, an unfortunate bug occurred (kudos to Arkane for fixing it really quickly! I think they had it solved in a couple days or something amazing like that) where some of the witches were dying when I was trying to render them unconscious. I couldnât get the nonlethal option to work.
But I wasnât that concerned, because I felt the witches needed to be killed.
Why?
Because theyâre horrible, and I think they seem closer to Vampires--supernatural monsters--than people.Â
I mean, listen to their dialogue. Look at what they do to the people they kill. They even backstab each other--one of their idle dialogues is about stealing from another. Another is about brushing her sisterâs hair so she can gain trust and then stab her sister in the throat. The witches are hostile too--itâs not possible to approach them peacefully. They react to you like youâve just invaded their vampiric crypt.
The mechanics donât really leave room for interacting with them sympathetically; thereâs no chance to talk to them, work with them, or anything. You can knock them unconscious, but it feels weird, even unconscionable to do that to people who are talking about stabbing each other in the throat.
Iâm okay with knocking someone out when the heart says something like âHe wasn't always like this. One of his works still hangs in a museum,â or âIf he looks sad, it is because he mourns the child he lost,â but I had to look up a list of the heartâs lines about the witches because I couldnât think of a time when the heart ever said anything good about a single one of the witches.
So, they have magical powers, want to do nothing but kill us, and theyâre even happy to kill each other too. Read some of the notes--itâs indicated that theyâre sadists. They take delight in killing anyone and everyone. The environmental storytelling seems to indicate the same thing; nothing good comes of a witchâs presence.
When I first did my quick gut-reaction post about Dishonored 2, I fumbled to articulate why Delilah bugged me. I felt like the game tried to excuse her at every turn. She had a bad life. She was a bastard child and treated poorly. Given my propensity for liking underdogs who were underestimated and mistreated, you might think Iâd like her too. But I saw what she did. I saw what sheâd chosen to become.
Many of the witches are contextualized in this way. I think the actual target of the museum mission--sorry, Iâve forgotten her name, it was 18 months ago--has this whole long backstory about being a rich lady who was going to get married off to a man she didnât love who was kind of a shitty person anyways.
In reading all of the lines in the game that the heart has for witches, most of them are about enjoying drinking blood, murdering families, and abusing children. One woman struggles to remember the person she was before, but that reminds me more of a vampireâs thrall than anything else, and the game never does anything with that. No âplease, I donât want to do this,â or anything.
They became witches, and are now visiting a far greater violence upon the Empire. As one of my friends pointed out--and Iâm inclined to agree--the Empire kind of deserves it, at least in Dishonored 2. Itâs not a good society. I mean, itâs weirdly forward thinking in some ways, right? Like literally all of the romantic fiction Iâve encountered in the universe is LGBT stuff. But then in other ways itâs a mirror of the 19th Century British Empire, abusing people and nature in equal measure. Like I said, Jessamine seemed to be trying to fix those things, but she died, and Dishonored 2 indicates that Emily shirked her responsibilities to be a better Empress.
But.
I mean.
Literally all of the heart dialogue we have for them paints them as bad people. The nicest person we have is one who despairs because itâs easier to hurt people with each passing month.
One of my friends has argued that these were all women who were mistreated or whatever, but the heart doesnât tell us about that. It isnât saying âher husband used to beat her, so she relishes the power she hasâ or anything. None of these lines speak to a culture of misogynistic violence. Instead, we have a woman who âspent a month killing those who had slighted her.â
Slighted.
Not abused, beat, hurt. Slighted.
There is, as far as Iâve seen, precisely one person who was a victim:Â âBeaten and abused, she was barely sane when she heard the coven's call. Now she does the same to others, wielding her power like a barbed whip.â
Iâve been abused. Itâs not something I like to talk about at length, but I was molested by an adult male (thankfully not my parents!) at the age of 11. I was abused by an ex who wanted to destroy me the way her mother had destroyed her, and those actions included gaslighting, emotional blackmail, and a ton of other things I donât really want to talk about. Iâve been physically and emotionally abused for my genetic shortcomings.
I learned, a very long time ago, that almost all abuse comes from people who were abused. Iâve met people who are very angry, and Iâve heard people say âah, well, itâs okay for them to lash out, because they were abused, so itâs only natural.â Heck, Iâve been one of the people who lashed out. It was only an emotional outburst, but it remains one of the worst things Iâve ever done. I will never stop regretting it.
I understand wanting justice. I understand wanting someone to hurt for what they did to you. I still have nightmares I donât talk about. Iâve sat with friends whoâve had it so much worse than me and done everything in my power to give them what comfort I can.
But the witches are different. They chose power. And they chose vengeance. Should we justify that? Would I be justified if I started murdering everyone who looked or seemed like the people who had wronged me? Does anything excuse the murder of a bunch of academics in a Karnacan museum? The witches speak with sadistic dialogue. One of the notes left behind by someone trying to hide in the gameâs final level makes it abundantly clear that their behaviors are monstrous.
So. Uh.
Look at Gary Oldmanâs Dracula.
Draculaâs whole thing is actually super sad, right? Like, the love of his life died while he was out fighting bad dudes. She was tricked into committing suicide, so he renounces God and gets cursed into becoming a monster. His origins are tragic. Itâs unfair what happened to him. But I mean, he still murders people and stuff. Dudeâs gotta get stabbed in the heart. Sure, itâs cool that his wife got reincarnated as Mina Harker and all, but his whole kidnapping her and trying to turn her into one of his thralls is still bad.
The reason that killing Dracula is good is because Dracula has power and he is a monster. These witches have power and they are monsters. They hurt people--not just the ones who deserve it, but the ones who donât. In the Brigmore witches, it sure as heck appears to be that theyâre preying on the poor. Itâs not like theyâre out there fighting a revolutionary war against the nobility, and that their magical powers tip the scale. No, theyâre killing everyone, even like⌠public works dudes. Itâs an indiscriminate process. Theyâre killing people they donât even know.
What makes them not monsters? They have power, and they use that power with cruelty. Dishonoredâs world is not a good one to live in, but there is nothing the heart has for us that says that these women were victims. In many cases, they were perpetrators before they got their powers.
Corvo may be kind of a shitty ruler, by seeing a ton of problems during the time of Dishonored 1 and not addressing them leading up to Dishonored 2, but heâs one of the only people who can actually fight a witch; I think the only people actually capable of fighting them are the creepy religious zealots who enjoy torturing people for fun (why didnât Corvo shut that down?).
So I was thinking about all of this when I killed the witches. They werenât human anymore. They were indiscriminately murdering anyone who stopped them. Their leader, Delilah, had been portrayed in two stories already as a monster, and while her backstory was tragic, she took that tragedy and used it to excuse being a murderous monster, who ruined the lives of everyone she met, regardless of who they were.
I would have had a much harder time squaring off against a witch who was using her powers to put a stop to her abuser. Like, I, personally, would probably not hunt down the man who hurt me as a kid and put a sledgehammer through his brains, but I mean, in a game, if a witch went to murder a man who molested her, I definitely would be treating her like a person.
These witches, I felt, after listening to them talk, listening to the heart, and watching them act so casually around the bodies of the people they murdered, werenât out for justice. They werenât trying to fight back against an oppressive and cruel society. They were monsters. When a witch is wandering around talking about going for a swim later or wondering how the new girlâs doing, it might seem fine, but to be so casual as she walks past a pile of bodies⌠thatâs monstrous. Murder is not a casual act.
Corvo (or Emily, if you played as her) is the only person who can stop the witches, even if you reject the Outsiderâs gifts and play without any powers at all. They outclass everyone else, and they kill for the thrill. Someone has to stop them. Itâs urgent.
A friend of mine got really upset with me for killing the witches. He said that these were women whoâd been mistreated and society deserved to burn. But I mean⌠if youâre a random guy in a library, are you gonna be able to stop a squad of guards who throw innocent people in prison, kill peopleâs dogs for meat to sell, or murder innocent people? What about a groundskeeper? What can he do?
The game does not, as far as I can tell, back up the assertion that the witches were victims given power. There is no justice--theyâre psychopaths who tortured children and animals, who murdered families, who relish in the carnage. The few women seen as good are losing those memories. Their existence as witches is a tragic one at best, and theyâre so reminiscent of horror characters who lose themselves through possession or vampirism that I donât know how to justify refusing to stop them.
A cop once told me about how he fought a man on PCP. The man had beaten his partner unconscious and was trying to choke him to death. Apparently this huge guy didnât even feel their tazers and they werenât supposed to shoot him. This cop ended up in a knock-down, drag out brawl with a man who wasnât feeling any pain. He ended up bashing a pyrex bowl over the guyâs head so hard it shattered before backup arrived. He told me âif I could have shot him, I think I would have.â
To me, this brings up the question: is it possible to be violent in a game for a constructive purpose? Thereâs that old quote, misattributed to Orwell, that says something like âwe sleep soundly in our beds at night because there are men who visit violence upon those who would do us harm.â
I must admit, Iâd love future Dishonored games that involved dismantling the monarchy and trying to find a better, fairer government. Iâd love to visit Pandyssia and dismantle traditional colonialist tropes. Iâd like to grapple with questions about the ethics of violence, because thatâs a subject that interests me on a personal level.
But I must admit, I was surprised when Dishonored 2 did everything to portray its witches as these inhuman, incredibly powerful beings, and then punished me for trying to protect the weak from their unbridled power. To me, my actions were heroic, because I was fighting a corrupted and almost unstoppable power in order protect the innocent. This is a game that let me save Aramis Stilton, a man who had fought for workers rights and was destroyed by the Duke for it.
(as an aside, I love Stilton; he grew up poor and earned his wealth honestly. He earned everything he had, so of course the nobility didnât think he deserved it, because rich people think the only honest way to have money is to receive it from oneâs parents. He never forgot where he came from and tried to do right by his workers, so the nobility destroyed him for it. Restoring his mind through time shenanigans is one of the most⌠most right things I have ever done in a game. I felt fortunate to be given that option)
I think, if the witches were human, if they were victims who deserved better, then the game should have supported that through its mechanics and narrative. But the heart--which, last I knew, told the truth--told me that they were monsters, and those that werenât had lost their humanity and were on their way to becoming monsters.
I would love other ways to solve problems. When the heart tells me that this man beats his son so hard his bruises last a month, I want to put a stop to it. But what can I do? My only verbs are âknock outâ or âmurder.â Should I knock out a monster that rejoices in slaughter? Or should I put it down so that it wonât kill again?
Dishonored 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I felt that the ending only considered whether I had performed violence, not whether that violence needed to be performed. In my own life, I went through hell and chose not to come out of it a monster. I donât know how to justify these women performing child abuse, animal abuse, and murder. Like vampires, they are monsters. No matter how tragic their origins, they prey on the weak and defenseless. I donât like violence, but I think maybe there are times when itâs an unfortunate requirement. They might have been powerless at one point, but in the game, their actions showed they did nothing but punch down. Personally, I think we should punch up or not at all.
Some time ago, I invited a friend over to watch one of my favorite movies with me. I was excited to share one of my favorites, sure that heâd enjoy it. Everything started out great, but my friend received a text, pulled out his phone, started texting back, and then, half an hour into the movie, looked up at me blankly and said âI donât get this. Can we watch something else?â I wanted to scream. He wasnât paying attention to the movie! Of course he didnât get it!
Thatâs an extreme case, but it illustrates an important point: if people donât connect with your story, theyâll want to try something else. My friend created his own problem, but heâs far from the only person to struggle with following a movie. Heck, Iâm a pretty smart dude who makes a living as a critic and game developer, I went to school to learn how to make and explain movies, and I still struggle to follow whatâs going on in some stories.
Whatâs the point of watching a movie we arenât connected to? David Mamet, one of the best living playwrights, once said âANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.â He wrote it just like that, in all caps, in a letter to the writers of a television show he was working on.
Itâs important to note that your audience doesnât need to understand your story, and thatâs why I havenât used the word until now. Itâs important that they connect to it emotionally. I loved watching Twin Peaks: The Return last summer, but I definitely didnât understand that final episode. Emotionally, I connected with it, and it left a lasting impression on me, but I canât tell you what was actually happening in that episode.
We make art for two primary reasons: to teach people things and to process emotions. Most of the former stuff is what you get in school, like âsee spot run,â or religious instruction, like Jesusâ parables. Most of the stuff we make is about emotional journeys. You might be watching an exciting action movie or a drama about coping with loss, but whatever the case is, youâre doing it to get some emotional experience out of it. The worst thing that can happen, then, is an emotional disconnect from the work.
The key to connecting to a work is emotional engagement.
So, in fiction, over the millennia, storytellers have developed tools for keeping audiences engaged. Some folks are good at it. Others arenât. Steven Spielberg is particularly great; Jaws is a masterpiece of tension; we watch it because it excites us, and Spielberg has made dozens of great movies that resonate with audiences around the world.
Itâs not a science, though. Emotions arenât like programs; you canât input the same information to every human and expect the same output. You can ballpark it, but weâre all going to react in different ways. I canât really tell you how I feel when watching Alien other than âit always grabs my attention,â but I know some people who roll their eyes at how dumb it is and others who are too scared to watch it all the way through.
We know some stuff works; dogs are good boys, so if a dog dies, the audience will probably be sad. That said, we also know that you have to earn the emotions you want; you canât just kill a dog and make the audience sad, the audience has to care that the dog. If the dog is a bad junkyard dog that harries our protagonists, we probably arenât going to be nearly as sad if it dies.
One of the biggest problems in movies is that they forget to earn their emotion. A monster attacking New York is a much bigger-scale problem than a couple in New York going through a divorce, but Godzilla is not as emotionally impactful to most people as Kramer vs Kramer is. We care more about Ted Kramer losing his son than we do about a bunch of people whose names Iâve forgotten facing off against Zilla. That movie was so bad, by the way, that Toho doesnât even consider Zilla to be a ârealâ Godzilla.
So itâs hard to get people to care, and a lot of work has to go into making them care, but even if you pull that off, they might struggle anyways. One reason that most television shows werenât serialized for most of the 20th Century is that people might miss an episode and have no idea what was going on.
Arrested Development was a show that required its audience to watch every episode. The Simpsons works because every episode ends where it began. If a Simpsons season airs out of order or you miss an episode, you can still understand whatâs going on. If the same thing happens in Arrested Development, nothing makes sense anymore.
I spoke with a TV writer who worked on Boston Legal, who explained that every episode was an exercise in reintroducing their characters; even non-serialized shows still need to help the audience connect to the characters. You canât assume anyone knows whatâs going on; some of the most successful television shows on the planet are successful because even channel surfers can tune in and grok things.
In games, it can be worse. You can watch a movie in a single sitting; it might take some patience, especially if youâre used to checking your phone every ten minutes, but you can make it through. Procedural TV shows are successful because each episode works as a stand-alone story. In contrast, most games can take days, weeks, and even months to complete. Heck, I started Company of Heroes four years ago and Iâm still not finished with it.
Thatâs a lot of words to make a simple point: all stories need to make sure the audience connects with âem on an emotional level, but games need to do it the most, because itâs harder to connect to games emotionally than anything else, because itâs so easy to distract audiences.
If you asked me what I thought of Assassinâs Creed Origins, Iâd tell you that itâs one of the best games in the series. If you asked me about the writing, Iâd tell you that itâs pretty good; several people in my Twitter feed have noted that Bayek, the gameâs protagonist, speaks differently to adults than he does to children, but not in a way that feels condescending. Heâs friendly, warm, and open. Heâs a good man and father, but one who has been wounded by some ugly circumstances, including the murder of his son.
I like Bayek almost as much as I like Ezio Auditore, the protagonist of Assassinâs Creed II, which remains the best game in the series, but more on that in a moment.
Origins has an unfortunate problem, which is in the way it introduces characters.
Since Iâm talking about the story of Origins, weâre gonna get into spoiler territory. Normally, I donât care all that much about issuing spoiler warnings, because my assumption is that if youâre reading criticism of a game, you should expect spoilers, but itâs a recent enough game that Iâll be on the safe side and offer you one now.
The game begins with Bayek assassinating⌠some guy. Weâre not really sure who this guy is or why, but Bayek doesnât really like him that much. Then he fights his way out of some ruins and meets another guy, who is a friend of some kind. Weâre not really sure why theyâre friends or what their relationship is, and when that guy dies later in the game, most of us probably didnât care all that much, because the guy gives us like two early quests, and thatâs the extent of our relationship with him.
You know whose death people do care about? Aeris Gainsborough, because we spend a lot of time with her in the game; sheâs not just someone we meet once and then forget about on our wacky adventures until she dies, sheâs someone we build a relationship with; her death matters because she matters to us.
Some of you might want to protest at this point that Bayek is Bayek and I am Me, and I cannot connect to Bayekâs friends the way he does, and thatâs true. Have you ever heard of the rule âshow, donât tellâ? That rule exists as a means of leveraging empathy to help people connect to a story. If someone says âSarah is crying because her dog died,â you might feel nothing, because you donât know who Sarah is or that her dog died. You can rationally understand that a dog dying is a sad event, but you are unlikely to connect to Sarah on an emotional level. If Sarah is your best friend, and she calls you on the phone in tears because her dog, Spot, who you used to play fetch with in the park, was hit by a car, then youâre going to feel a lot more strongly about it.
So Bayek is angry and heâs talking about some guys with weird animal names and how heâs going to kill them. He talks about how heâs been gone for a while but now heâs back. He talks about being a medjay, which is never really explained in depth, but it sounds like a kind of Egyptian Sheriff, who roams the land righting wrongs.
There are two problems here. First, weâre processing this intellectually, not emotionally, so it doesnât really resonate with us. Second, the writers appear to be doing their best to approach this realistically. What I mean is, Bayek isnât like âugh, Iâve lost my memory, please explain how everything works?â or âhmm, Iâve forgotten you, who are you? Please tell me who you are.â Some games approach this with more subtlety; I love Half-Life because nobody knows whatâs going on, not just you. Thereâs nothing to explain.
Origins clearly understands that awkward exposition can be annoying, so it avoids it and hopes the audience will infer most of what it needs to know⌠until it decides to flashback back to when Bayekâs son was still alive. Bayek gets to explain a bit about what being a Medjay is to his son, which is a nice, naturalistic way to exposit, and eventually we see how his son was murdered and why heâs mad at all these animal dudes that heâs been killing. Then weâre back in the present, doing more quests. At one point, you stumble across Bayekâs house. I did not realize, for the longest time, that this was Bayekâs house. It was just A House. Then Bayek said something and I was like âooooh⌠okay.â But I didnât feel like it mattered to me.
In an ideal world, the audience emotions are in lockstep with the character emotions. At some point, Bayek decides to go stab some more dudes in the face, and find out how his wife has been doing stabbing some other dudes in the face. Weâve never met her and only heard references to her so far, so when we do finally meet her⌠well, Bayek seems relieved, but this is our introduction to the character. What we feel about this meeting and what he feels about it are two different things; Iâve never met Aya. Sheâs a stranger. I feel like a third wheel, disconnected from the experience.
Now, Iâm not going to take you through the entirety of the game, but this ends up being a consistent problem. When I met Julius Caesar--you know, that Julius Caesar--I didnât realize it was him at first. It was just some dude. Then it turns out the villain is actually his⌠sidekick? Thereâs this guy we meet in like⌠one scene in the game? Julius, or Jules, if youâre buds, is like âhey, that guy you want to kill who you thought killed your son? Heâs not the dude. Also I donât want you to kill him, Iâm going to arrest him.â The real guy is his bodyguard dude whoâs standing next to him. At one point he says something like âyes, Caesar, I will ready the guardsâ or something, but when itâs revealed that heâs the villain, itâs⌠it just feels kind of random?
Alpha Protocol did this too; I remember playing that game and finding out that the real big bad was⌠the guy who helped me put on gear at the start of the game or something. Like, a random guy who was in a couple scenes and just kind of forgettable, the game suddenly states âhey, heâs the bad guy! Mwahahaha!â
I think the game writers believe this is clever. âWow, that guy in the background was an evil villain the whole time!â But this only works if you actually know the character and donât suspect them. A forgettable character is not the same thing. No One Lives Forever pulled this off by having a drunkard in every single level; it seemed like a funny gag. Every time you met him, it was like âhaha, oh, this guy again.â Then it turned out that he was the villain the entire time. Because you recognized him, the revelation mattered. No other game has done this nearly as well. Origins doesnât do it well at all.
Whatâs weird is, so many times, youâre playing the game and it just seems to assume that you know who youâre talking to. When people were saying the guyâs name--and I didnât encounter it enough times to remember it, despite playing almost nothing but Assassinâs Creed Origins from beginning to end in the span of two weeks--I wasnât matching the name to the face. I didnât know who the guy was.
Imagine someone going âwow, Bob? I canât believe Bob was the villain the whole time!â and Iâm over here just wondering who Bob is. Who is it that all these people are talking about? I have no idea.
Origins does that a lot.
Itâs hard to care when you canât put a name to a face. Itâs hard to care when you feel like you donât know whatâs going on. Itâs hard to care when you arenât feeling what the protagonist is feeling; the best stories are so often about experiencing the same emotional journey as the characters. We should feel scared when they feel scared, exhilarated when they feel exhilarated, angry when they feel angry. If I feel disinterested when Bayek feels angry, then Iâm not going to feel satisfied when I kill the men who murdered his son. Instead, Iâm going to feel like I just checked off another item on the list.
DOOM is so satisfying because you feel what Doomguy feels. Youâre just as happy to kill demons as he is.
Origins is a huge game; I have like 60 hours in it and have tons of sidequests left to complete and locations left to find. I canât help but feel that some of the gameâs resources could have been better spent trying to introduce things better. Instead of an in media res introduction, what if the game had began with Bayek performing the duties of a Medjay, spending time with his wife, helping his son become a better man⌠and then losing all of that.
Thereâs a villain we kill named the Crocodile. We meet a little girl, and later, she gets killed. We find out who did it--the Crocodileâs henchmen. We hunt down those henchmen. We meet an âold friendâ (who Bayek knows but we donât), fight alongside her in the arena, and eventually kill the henchmen. Then suddenly our old friend is⌠somehow a bodyguard for the Crocodile now? The Crocodile is a random old lady who was in the arena crowds, who we literally never met or even saw before? Seeing the Celts, watching how intimidating they were, and killing them because they hurt a kid we knew mattered.
I ran into the Crocodileâs house and killed her before it even dawned on me that the person she was speaking with was Bayekâs old friend.
How much better would it have been if we knew the Crocodile in her human guise? If we knew our old friend from the time before, then meeting her again would feel relieving; weâd be happy to know someone had our back. Her eventual betrayal and service to the Crocodile would actually matter. As it was, when I killed the Crocodile, my âold friendâ simply despawned, and I never saw her again. I think the game wanted me to care that sheâd switched sides. I barely knew her and she disappeared when I stabbed the Crocodile with my hidden blade.
Speaking of the hidden blade, itâs weird to me that the game never really goes into its creation; itâs the most iconic thing in the entire series, and it just⌠kinda happens? Bayek accidentally slices his finger off at one point, the end. Assassinâs Creed and Assassinâs Creed II both made it out to be this big, important thing. Losing your finger was the mark of becoming an assassin. The blade was part of that identity. In Origins, blink and youâll miss it.
Normally, when I criticize a game, I try to talk about why something works or doesnât, but I try not to say âit might be better if they did this or that.â The reason for this is because I donât know what it was like for the developers to make the game, and hey, the gameâs out now, so itâs not like they can change things. Recommendations are for when Iâm consulting on a game, not after the fact.
Here, Iâve talked about what Assassinâs Creed Origins could have done to make things better, and that reason is this: because another game already did it.
Assassinâs Creed II begins with you as Ezio Auditore, punk teenager living a life of luxury with his family in Florence. Everything seems nice. When you meet Leonardo da Vinci, the game makes it clear that, hey, this is Leonardo da Vinci. It treats it as sort of a casual thing, but does so in a way that still makes it clear that youâre meeting an important historical character, as opposed to Julius Caesarâs introduction in Origins.
Thereâs a confidence in Assassinâs Creed II; the game takes it slow. Instead of murdering villainous scum, you beat up a punk who insulted your sister. You help your brother find feathers. You perform errands for your mother. You learn how to do everything in the small sandbox of Florence before the game properly begins, and in doing so, you build relationships with some of the gameâs most important characters.
When your father, who seems like a good and honorable man, is unjustly imprisoned, you feel desperate to save him. When your father and brothers are hanged, your mother suffers a mental breakdown, and you and your sister are forced to go on the run, your plight feels dangerous. You feel angry and helpless.
You donât know the murdererâs name, but you know his face, because youâve seen him repeatedly throughout the game. Uncovering his identity--Rodrigo Borgia, is a big part of Assassinâs Creed IIâs adventure. Every step of the way, Assassinâs Creed II primes you emotionally for whatâs to come. When bad things happen to people youâre allied with, you care, because youâve built relationships with these people. When you take down the Borgias, itâs so satisfying because you knew them.
A random guy who was Caesarâs sidekick is way less satisfying to kill.
Origins plays better, in some ways, than Assassinâs Creed II. The quests are enjoyable. The world design is neat. I love the map. I love the more modern controls. The combat system is undoubtedly better--itâs a very Dark Souls-inspired controller setup. This is a game that has learned so many important lessons from other great games.
I just wish I cared more about the people I met along the way.
I wanted to post this last month, but then I got hospitalized. Oops. Turns out Iâm diabetic and I have a heart condition that requires surgery. It took a lot out of me. Really sorry this oneâs being posted in April instead of March. Iâm hoping to publish a lot more this month, though!
Meant to post this one in February, but I ended up working 18-20 hours a day with only an hour or two for breaks and it slipped my mind. Not gonna lie, things are bad right now. My heart hasnât stopped hurting in weeks, and the other day, it started beating so fast I almost fainted and had to sit down. Not sure whatâs up with that, but nothing good. Iâll have more stuff for yaâll in March. Working on supporter requests including RE4, FFXV, Freespace 2, and Metroid Prime.
No genre ever truly dies, but the walking simulator does appear to be on life support. The Chinese Room, a studio that developed nothing but walking simulators, laid off most of its staff and hit pause earlier this year. Fullbright, which sold over 700,000 copies of Gone Home in 2013, barely managed to move 10,000 copies of Tacoma in 2017. So what happened? How does a genre fall so quickly so fast?
Some people hate the name 'walking sim', a term that appears to have originated in early 2012 as a pithy way of describing The Chinese Roomâs debut, Dear Esther. While it wasnât the first walking sim in existence, Dear Esther was the first walking sim to penetrate the public consciousness, earning back its budget just a few hours after its release on Steam. In the years since, developers and fans have proposed all sorts of genre names, but 'walking sim' is the one that stuck.
Itâs an apt descriptor: in a walking sim, the playerâs primary, and often only, source of interaction is to walk forward while audio plays at various points. Occasionally, the player may be tasked with some light puzzle-solving or some other form of limited interaction, but these rarely have much mechanical depth. Most walking sims are first-person games, but there are a few third-person ones as well, like Beyond Eyes.
Since their inception, walking sims have been embroiled in debate. The genreâs proponents argue they are are a new frontier that will allow games to tackle important subjects and move beyond their violent roots. Meanwhile, the walking simâs detractors claim that walking sims lack any kind of meaningful interaction, rendering them worthless.
The biggest argument against walking sims goes like this: "they arenât games." Gamers have a problem with elitism; people who slog and swear through a game on a higher difficulty level see themselves as âtrue gamers,â as opposed to those who play it on easy mode. When a former Bioware writer suggested that people should be able to skip gameplay, gamers issued death threats and demands that she be fired.
In my experience, gamers have a tendency to demand games be harder and more interesting. Thereâs a sense that a game that doesnât challenge its players is not authentic or true. Players make claims of casualization. The reason gamers wanted Jennifer Hepler fired from Bioware was because she suggested that players should be allowed to skip gameplay and only partake in the story, which kind of defeats the point of a game being a game at all.
Youâll find gamers who demand that Dark Souls not have an easy mode, even though that would be helpful for disabled players like me. I love Halo, but plenty of players donât like that I play on Heroic and say that a true Halo fan would play on Legendary. Sorry, I like running around like a maniac and performing stupid Warthog stunts; Legendary doesnât provide me with that same thrill.
This desire for hardcore experiences isnât inherently wrong; Iâve been playing Ion Maiden, and several of the level solutions cater to smart, hardcore play. But it does lead to people dismissing some things a bit too quickly.
So, when the walking sim arrived, with its lack of in-depth gameplay, the response was predictable, and people have been criticizing the genre ever since. Google Trends indicates the term âwalking simâ originates in March 2012, mere weeks after Dear Estherâs remarkable debut.
When it comes to walking sims, the hardcore players are technically correct, but actually wrong. A âgame,â is, more or less, a form of structured play, and while thatâs a remarkably broad definition, it doesnât necessarily cover walking sims. In the same way that âreal time strategyâ isnât the best name for the RTS genre, âvideo gamesâ isnât really the best name for the medium. Sure, it worked when the only games that existed were titles like Pong and Pitfall, but even then, 1979âs FS1 Flight Simulator could never be classed as a game. There are plenty of things that most people would consider to be a âvideo gameâ even if theyâre not truly games, and walking sims are no exception.
But even if walking sims werenât considered video games, would it really matter? Sure, they have more in common with art installations than competitive sports, but so what? Whether a walking sim is a âreal gameâ or not doesnât stop it from existing and canât stop it from being praised or discussed. Taxonomy only goes so far; the work cannot be dismissed simply because someone might have got the classification wrong.
Every E3, people pop up in my Twitter feed claiming that the majority of games on display are violent, intimating that violence keeps games puerile. They champion walking sims like Tacoma and Gone Home as exactly the kind of game the industry needs, elevated by their lack of nonviolent gameplay. Of course, this ignores all of the other, more involved non-violent games that routinely make appearances at game shows, like racing games, puzzle games, sports games, city builders, simulators, and so on. Not every game shows up on stageâitâs a bit difficult to make an exciting Farming Simulator trailerâbut pretending these games donât exist in order to elevate walking sims is disingenuous.
Years ago, pioneering adventure game designer Roberta Williams stumbled into this kind of elitism in an interview where she implied that people below a certain income or education level enjoyed violent games, saying that âMore âaverageâ people feel now that they should own [a computer].â Supposedly, the masses enjoyed violent games with immediate gratification, while more educated, upper class fans preferred nonviolent adventure games, because they were better people.
Itâs strange that people argue that walking sims are pioneering new territory; thereâs nothing walking sims like Dear Esther or Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs do that hasnât been done before. Early shooters like Half-Life and No One Lives Forever featured sections with this style of gameplay at the turn of the century. Two years before Dear Estherâs 2012 commercial release, Metro 2033 alternated between combat sequences and sections that have a lot more in common with what we seen in walking sims today, albeit a great deal more interactive.
The suggestion that violence prevents games from being taken seriously is objectively false. After all, one of filmâs most important early directors, D.W. Griffith, supposedly claimed âall you need for a good story is a girl and a gun.â Violent films like Stanley Kubrickâs Full Metal Jacket and The Coen Brothersâ No Country for Old Men have won plenty of awards. Violence is a facet of the human experience; while itâs great to have art without violence, itâs ignorant to suggest that violent art is less meaningful than the alternative. Wanting a medium to be taken seriously is a foolish desire; claiming that violence prevents it from being taken seriously is an ignorant position to take. Non-violence doesnât make something inherently important or valuable.
The walking simâs defenders have made other arguments as well. A recent piece on Salon, for instance, inaccurately claims that gamer culture began criticizing walking sims in 2016, further suggesting that military interest in games is responsible for gamers being angry about walking sims. Neither claim appears to be true. The piece also claims that Firewatch is beautiful, which âmakes it more susceptible to backlash.â
None of these claims are satisfactory. After all, itâs self-evident that gamers love non-violent games; why else would games like American Truck Simulator or FIFA be popular? Gamers donât shy away from heavy themes, either; plenty of people love games like Wolfenstein: The New Order, Life is Strange, and Hellblade, which all deal with concepts not commonly discussed in video games. Many games even use violence to make a point. Other games allow violent play but encourage players to act peacefully, like the Metro and Metal Gear Solid series.
I think thereâs something more at play here. Imagine enjoying something and spending a great deal of time and money on it, then having a bunch of critics show up and claim that the thing you enjoy so much isnât worthwhile, and some other thing, which you donât enjoy, is supposed to be a great deal more important. Wouldnât that bother you? It feels like much of the criticism Iâve seen of walking sims over the years is tinged with jealousy, of worrying that walking sims are being given credit that other games are due.
Still, this frustration doesnât explain why walking sims, for a few years, were critically acclaimed, financially successful games that dealt with topics most games didnât, but the genre seemed to die off quickly. Within five years of Dear Estherâs release, The Chinese Room put future projects on hold and let the majority of their staff go. The hotly-anticipated Tacoma sold about 1.5% of the copies of its predecessor. Ether Oneâs creators White Paper Games are now working on The Occupation, which moves away from traditional walking sim tropes towards something more like a first person adventure. David Szymanski, who previously developed nothing but walking sims, is now working on a hotly-anticipated shooter called Dusk.
Why the move away from walking sims?
At its core, I think the genreâs simplicity is the problem. Itâs a fundamentally reductive genre; all you do is walk, usually listening to someone elseâs story take place. While that is a mechanic in and of itself, it rarely becomes anything more. A walking simâs story should be about you exploring the environment, because you are the point-of-view character, but in walking sims, the POV character is usually the person doing the voiceover instead, telling you another story entirely. Youâre just there to press W and trigger the occasional audio clip. At best, youâll have to consider the environment, contrasting what youâre hearing with what youâre seeing, like an art installation. Compare that with a shooter, which is much more engaging, not just because thereâs more to do mechanically, but because shooters work to keep things varied.
Some of my favorite moments in games have been shooters trying something different, like the ghost sections of the Metro series, which, in one case, involved following your guideâs directions to the letter, and in others, gave you visions of what life was like before the bombs fell. These non-violent sections are sometimes just as light on interaction as walking sims, but theyâre interspersed with more engaging gameplay, giving Metro a sense of variety. By stripping out a great deal of interaction, walking sims tend to be one-note experiences. Without variety to keep the players interested, attention wanes. For most people, playing one walking sim is more than enough. Why bother with Tacoma after youâve played Gone Home?
Much of the praise for walking sims come from the content of their stories, not the gameplay, which makes you wonder why theyâre video games at all? Is a gameâs story best told through voiceover? This rarely seems to be the case in other media. Think how boring Gone Home: The Movie would be. A woman walks through a house, voiceover plays sometimes, and eventually it ends. Would that be satisfying to any audience? Most people would say no.
One of storytellingâs oldest and best rules is this: show, donât tell. People are more likely to buy into a story that they experience than one that has been related to them. Life is Strange and Gone Home both tell stories about high school lesbians, but Life is Strange doesnât receive the kind of ânot a gameâ insults that Gone Home does, because it shows the relationship. Gone Home merely talks about one.
The genreâs decline has less to do with a boorish obsession violence and what constitutes a real game and a lot more to do with boredom. The anger surrounding walking sims seems to come more from insecurity, either from a conviction that games are not taken seriously and that somehow, walking sims must replace traditional games to justify the medium to the general public, or from the belief that they are not âreal games,â and feeling threatened by their advocates.
The walking sim isnât doing so well because thereâs only so much it can do without meaningful interaction. Other games handle the same topics, but their more in-depth mechanics tend to be rewarded with better word of mouth. If developers want to resuscitate the genre, then they need to change it. Fortunately, some developers already have.
Firewatch, one of the most highly-praised walking simulators ever, breaks from tradition by giving the player dialogue options. Allowing the player to make choices while traveling the world gives the player a better sense of agency and investment in the story. Itâs happening to you, not someone else.
While most walking sims involve little more than walking or listening, some have attempted to do more interesting things. Brendon Chungâs Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone have moments including peeling an orange, taking photos of birds, and a high-speed motorcycle chase. Instead of having characters explain all these sequences in audio logs, Chung puts the players directly in the situation, giving the game a lot more impact.
One of the best games of 2017, What Remains of Edith Finch, explores the minds of the Finch family, and itâs bursting at the seams with rich and inventive sequences. One moment, youâre a child in a bath, then youâre a tentacled creature in a forest, and soon youâre a kid flying into the sky on a swing. Edith Finch relies on the mechanical variety of its sequences to draw the player into its stories, rather than simply playing audio as the player walks through an empty house.
Shooters like Wolfenstein II and the Metro series are all about mixing high-stakes combat with slower, more poignant moments, providing a way of exploring complex ideas in ways that still makes you feel like youâre really in the characterâs shoes, living out their stories. They have no room for passive observers; theyâre too busy letting you inhabit the characters you play.
Fundamentally, thereâs nothing really wrong with walking sims. Itâs just that other games handle the same topics in ways that invite more participation, and most players are more interested in being the characters they play than hearing about those characters from an epistolary audiobook. Theyâre not that popular because theyâre fairly limited as a form, and once the initial newness wore off, there wasnât that much to support them.
For the walking sim to thrive now, itâs going to have to move beyond âwalk forward while audio plays at you.â Letting players participate in the narrative as it happens, like What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, or Thirty Flights of Loving do, is a great way to push the medium forward. I think, over the next few years, weâre going to see other genres borrowing elements of the walking sim, and if weâre lucky, standouts like Thirty Flights of Loving. The walking sim might be on life support, but if it can evolve, it doesnât have to be.
changelog: i added a little section to clarify the whole âgamer elitismâ thing; itâs italicized so you can see what i did
update: turns out that heart problem I had almost killed me; thanks to some amazing friends and a gofundme, Iâm still alive, but dealing with the fallout of that
donât know why I wrote âvideogamesâ when I meant âvideo games,â but whatever.
This piece was originally slated for another publication about a year ago. It didnât get published. So here it is.
This time, Iâm confident I have him. Father Gascgoine has been plaguing me for weeks, but Iâve got it all worked out. I enter the arena, pumped up and ready to do this. For a few minutes, everythingâs fine, but then I feel that telltale twinge in my hand. Before I know it, the painâs burning up my arm and into my neck. I have to put the controller down. My poor health has betrayed me again. Iâll never be good enough to beat a Souls game.
Dark Souls is hard. Thatâs what itâs known for. In a world where the biggest and most successful games are built on promises about playing your own way, Dark Souls is brutal and unrelenting. FromSoftwareâs magnum opus demands you take it on its own terms, a strategy that has proved wildly popular; few games can lay claim to a fanbase as passionate and loyal as Dark Souls.
A debate has raged for years over whether or not Dark Souls would benefit from an easy mode. Fans will tell you that no, difficulty is an essential element of the Dark Souls experience, that much of the gameâs fun is found in its difficulty, and they have a point. Others, people who have wanted to embrace the series, but derive enjoyment in games from anything other than challenge, believe that Dark Souls would be better off with an easy mode.
Dark Souls joins all-time greats like Doom and Donkey Kong in establishing its own formula. Indie and AAA game developers alike have borrowed heavily from the Souls series, with games like Salt and Sanctuary, Lords of the Fallen, and Nioh. Before we ask ourselves whether Souls should have an easy mode, we need to understand how Souls games work.
Souls works like this: you, the player, have to travel through the gameâs world, conquering its challenging bosses. Whenever you defeat an enemy, you earn a currency, called âsouls,â or âblood echoes,â or something similar, which you use to purchase upgrades. If you die, you drop your collection of souls and respawn at the last save point, usually a physical location like a bonfire. Crucially, you cannot bank souls. This means that as your power grows, so does the need to explore world, putting yourself at risk, until you have enough souls to purchase more powerful upgrades.
The combat requires you to play thoughtfully. You must keep an eye on your stamina bar, which drains based on your attacks and movement. Draining your stamina at an inopportune time could result in an unfortunate death. Your attacks are usually animation-driven, which means that when you press a button to attack, you cannot break out of the attack animation until it has completed. A properly-timed attack means the difference between life and death in a Souls game.
These mechanics are then set in a world designed to accommodate them. Souls mechanics would never work in a game like The Witcher 3, where players could simply observe enemies and circle around them, avoiding the confrontation entirely. Souls maps, on the other hand, are built with explicit encounter design in mind. An early encounter in Dark Souls 3 features a dragon that will easily roast unsuspecting players. You rush up some stairs, get roasted, die, and start back at the bonfire, wiser now than you were before. As you progress, you discover shortcuts that make traversal significantly easier.
Over time, you learn about the gameâs world. What seemed like cruelty at first is playful and mischievous. The world becomes more readable. Dark Souls thrives on initial surprise and eventual mastery. âGit gud,â the fanbaseâs mantra, isnât so much a statement of derision as a description of the playerâs evolution. The more you play, the better you become.
One of the big appeals of turn-based games like XCOM and Civilization is the way they convince their players to keep going. âJust one more turn,â you tell yourself, and before you know it, itâs 5 in the morning and youâve been up all night and have nearly liberated Earth from an alien menace. The Souls games are like that too, but they use difficulty to accomplish the same thing. Get instakilled by a cleverly-placed boss? Before you know it, youâre back at the nearest bonfire. âThat was a cheap death,â you tell yourself, âI can totally get past it.â
Dark Souls is a game of mastery, expertly crafting an emotional narrative to accompany your growing skill. Overcoming that seemingly-impossible boss is thrilling. Laughing along at the designerâs jokey ambushes is enjoyable. Souls engages you, draws you in, and delivers some of the best emotional highs in gaming.
Itâs unfair to say that Souls is just a hard game; there are thousands of challenging games out there. Dead Rising 2 creates challenge through time management. Ikarugaâs difficulty is based on player reflex. Souls is a game that uses its difficulty tuning to help establish its compelling formula. Without the difficulty, so much of what makes Souls such a brilliant series would be lost.
Despite this, I wish the Souls games had an easy mode, because I canât play it like you. I want to share in the stories and strategies. I want to beat Father Gascoigne with a Donkey Conga controller and put the video up on YouTube. I want to master the gameâs systems. I want to be a part of this passionate and vibrant community so much, but I canât.
I canât because my body is shutting down.
Twelve years ago, I got sick. At first, it was just mild fatigue. Doctors said it was some bug that would pass. Family thought it was teenage laziness. Then it got worse. Prior to getting sick, Iâd been learning to fly planes. I used to climb regularly at the YMCA. I loved boating--whether it was a 50 mile camping trip or whitewater rafting, I was there. Within months, Iâd almost completely lost my ability to function. One doctor told me that, after looking at my lab results, she was amazed I had the strength to get out of bed at all.
It took four years to get a diagnosis, but instead of having some name to give my illness, like cancer or lupus or something, I was told that some genes just didnât work right. It was a lot more complicated than that, but thatâs the gist of it. As a result, I suffer from chronic pain and chronic fatigue, and I also have all the symptoms that come with a severe lack of magnesium, because my body doesnât absorb it properly.
Chronic fatigue is a deeply misunderstood disease. People donât get it. If you get cancer or multiple sclerosis, there is some degree of understanding there. Chronic fatigue is much harder to explain. Many people donât believe itâs real. Some countries classify it as a mental disorder, rather than a physical one. Everything I ever wanted to do in life has been ripped away from me by this illness. Without games writing, which Iâm fortunate enough to be able to do from home, I donât know how I would survive.
During her TED talk on chronic fatigue, documentarian Jennifer Brea pauses and simply states âmy brain is not what it used to be.â I know what she means, because Iâve been there. I was so much more than this. Chronic fatigue consumes everything. Iâm lucky because for me, there is some degree of hope. With regular treatment, I could go back to living something resembling a normal life, but since the illness limits what jobs I can take, my income is limited, which limits my ability to pay for treatment for my illness. Dealing with my illness is as simple as a potential employer taking a chance on me so I can earn enough to pay for treatment. I donât know how Iâll ever get to a place where I can afford regular treatment, but I hope that one day I will.
In the meantime, I play games, which are an incredible escape from chronic pain and chronic fatigue. A physical therapist once told me that people like me spend 90% of our attention on keeping pain at bay. Playing games helps offload some of that stress. But, as you can imagine, playing Dark Souls style games for me is a lot harder than it is for most folks, which makes escapism challenging. So many of my friends love finding their Dark Souls groove and playing the game for hours. Iâd love to experience that too.
Most of you arenât likely to have your hands seize up after playing for half an hour, much less be drained for an entire weekend after trying and failing to take down Bloodborneâs Father Gascoigne. An easy mode for me would mean that I could enjoy these games at the same level of effort that you do.
But itâs not that simple. Disability isnât something most of us talk about openly. Discussing it has a tendency to make people uncomfortable; some even resent having to deal with it. Itâs hard to leave the house most days, knowing that most people donât have the compassion or patience to put up with my illness. Worse still, many people go out of their way to make things worse, justifying it with some weird, self-righteous slant Iâve never understood.
Iâve had employers force me to work in conditions that exacerbated my symptoms because they thought they could convince me that my illness was all in my mind, never mind what the doctorâs notes said. Heck, I got kicked off a podcast; two of my fellow podcasters told me they were doing me a favor. Apparently, cutting off all ties would help me magically get over my illness and manage my life better. When it comes to disability, otherwise good people can do terrible things, going to great lengths to justify their abuse as âfor your own good.â
Playing games with my friends or chatting about games on forums, twitter, and Skype gives me the ability to socialize with other people without having to worry about my illness getting in the way. As long as I remain untreated, Iâll be a shut-in, but I can still have human contact through the internet.
While I can talk about my own experiences in great detail, I am far from the only person whose health issues limit gameplay options. Many disabilities limit gameplay. I have a friend with severe arthritis that makes gaming on a console impossible. Two of my friends have epilepsy, which can be triggered by playing certain video games. Iâve met people with color-blindness and deafness; all of these things impact their gameplay experience.
How far should a developer go in ensuring their audience can enjoy their work? Generally, I think itâs best to err on the side of accessibility; if a game can support a color-blind mode, it should. If a designer can ensure that hearing impaired players have good subtitles, their game would benefit from its inclusion.
With my chronic pain and fatigue issues, rapidly mashing buttons in games like Bayonetta or God of War can be physically draining; alternate QTE options would go a long way towards making games more accessible. I was delighted to discover that Dragon Age: Inquisition, a huge, open world game, had an auto-run toggle button. Splatoon offers players a wide variety of playstyles, allowing players to contribute, regardless of ability.
At the same time, I recognize that not every solution is a perfect one; shoot-em-ups like Ikaruga are built to be bright and flashy. Projectiles have to be big and bright enough to dodge. These games can trigger symptoms in epilepsy sufferers, and I donât think thereâs a way to avoid that without fundamentally changing the gameâs design.
There is no easy answer, but offering multiple difficulty modes, vision modes, and allowing control customization all go a long way towards keeping games accessible.
Some developers and publishers are going the distance to make sure that disabled gamers are cared for. Microsoft has recently introduced copilot mode, which allows two different controllers to control the same game. The Xbox One Elite controller is great for players with disabilities thanks to its extensive customization options. Unfortunately, Sony does not offer similar disability support, but thanks to devices like Cronusmax Plus, you can use the Xbox One Elite controller on the Playstation 4, or even a mouse and keyboard.
As my health has deteriorated over the past few years, so has my gaming ability. Destinyâs Trials of Osiris event is a competitive multiplayer event where players must win nine matches of five rounds each against an opposing team. I went on a flawless run back in 2015, but I havenât been since. Controllers are awful for me; playing with them often results in hand cramps and muscle spasms. Itâs much less painful to aim with a mouse, so Iâve been eyeing a Cronusmax with an intent to use its mouse and keyboard controls to play Trials of Osiris again.
I was deeply concerned to hear that Jeff Kaplan, Vice President of Blizzard, had argued against the use of these devices. If Kaplanâs shortsighted suggestion became a reality, disabled gamers using assistive technologies would have their consoles rendered useless, not just for Overwatch, but for all games. Kaplan also suggested letting all consoles use mouse and keyboard controls natively, which would be fantastic for disabled gamers, but itâs frustrating to hear that he would even consider the first option.
How would an easy mode in Souls work? Itâs simple: let players take a lot more damage before dying. Itâs a blast to watch my friends take on the dual-boss fight of Ornstein and Smough, but that fight requires some flawless timing that I canât always pull off. I tense my muscles when Iâm trying to time things perfectly; not having to worry about timing would help me avoid triggering severe pain later on.
Obviously, there are better ways to adjust difficulty, but they would require a lot more work on the developerâs part. Tweaking enemy animations to provide longer âtellsâ prior to attacking would be a great step. Dark Soulsâ movements are animation-based, rather than input-based, which means that once you press a button, your character has to follow through with the animation before making another move. Giving player input priority over animation would let players correct mistakes a lot easier.
To a hardcore Dark Souls player, Iâm sure this all sounds like heresy. The suggestions are moot, of course--From is done making Souls games, and itâs unlikely that they would ever patch in an easy mode. Souls is just an example, something I hope that future developers can learn from. I would like to enjoy your favorite game as much as you do, but I canât, not as it is.
Playing video games literally saved my life. On my worst days, games make life bearable. Games give me community and distraction. So, when it comes to the question of whether Dark Souls have an easy mode, I think the obvious answer is yes. For me, an easy mode would let me play the game like it was meant to be played without worrying about crippling muscle spasms the next day. I just want to enjoy life and spend time with friends; games I can play without agony let me do that.
Ultimately, developers are welcome to do whatever they want to do with the games they want to make. My hope is that this piece initiates a conversation about how to open doors to everyone who wants to play or make video games. Living life with disability is hard mode, and thereâs no option to change difficulties. If you have the ability to help us, would you?
2017 was not a good year for me. My health, without treatment, continues to decline. I had pieces killed, which has never happened before. I couldnât find a cheaper place to live, so I lost my home and my food stamps, moving back in with people who love me, but hate so many things about me. I had former friends telling me I should never make videos again. Lots of stuff.
I got to do my first on-site consulting gig, which was really cool, and thanks to an amazing friend, airline miles, and work, I was able to go to GDC for the cost of food and lyft fees and meet some amazing people. So many amazing people. This year was worth it for that alone. Iâve watched my friends succeed at cool creative endeavors, whether that means landing dream jobs or getting their games funded or whatever.
I spent a lot of time bedridden, and literally 0 time socializing or hanging out with friends. Iâm living a solitary life. No dogs to walk, no social commitments. Thanks to my untreated health issues, Iâm exhausted to do much beyond seek work, do what freelance work I can, work on the game and hope we find funding. A physical therapist once told me âpeople like you devote 90% of their attention to keeping pain at bay.â I use games for that. Itâs a coping mechanism. I envy my friends who can work regularly. When Iâm able to afford treatment, ideally if G1 gets funded, Iâll gladly join them.
Itâs not all bad. I think itâs important to play and learn from games. If I didnât do it, I wouldnât be able to write about them, and thatâs the only thing keeping me alive, so I could regret that time, but Iâm not gonna. It kept me alive through 2017.
We had a publisher look at our game last year. They told us the pitch was, and I quote this, âperfect.â The guy we pitched to was shocked that our multiplayer functionality wasnât just working, but working well (G1, as some of you know, is a co-op game, so we had functioning AI with four players running pretty well!). They elected not to go for us because we wanted to enter early access between Fall 2018 and Spring 2019, and they said they had three shooter commitments shipping during that time. Encouraging, but not a yes. Not that my first pitch to a publisher ever would be a yes. I get that. But I need a yes soon.
This year, I completed 52 games, some short (What Remains of Edith Finch, 2 hours, Resident Evil 7, 10 hours, Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, 90 minutes), some long (a Mass Effect replay for work and Destiny 2, also for work, got quite a few hours from me). I completed 8 single-player DLCs. I abandoned 240 games.
Now, Iâve played some games that arenât really abandoned, games Iâll be coming back to when I can. I did everything in Breath of the Wild but a shrine or two, for instance. I havenât finished Death of the Outsider--Iâm basically done--because I donât want it to end.
I hope, in 2018, G1 finds funding, I can use my salary to move out and seek medical assistance, and the rest of my team can finally rest easy. Iâve spent years helping devs make better games. Iâve spent even longer explaining how good shooter mechanics work. I know weâll be a huge success. It all comes down to funding.
You can see the full list of games I played, as well as my personal ratings for them, by clicking here.
Sub-Machine Guns Are Literally The Worst And I Hate Them. Here Is Why.
âO, Sub Machine Gun, thou vile and treacherous thing. How darest thou darken my arsenal with thy loathesome form! What infidelity to righteousness! Do not tarry here!â ~ some poet, 1529
Look, hereâs the fuckin deal: I have posted thousands of rants on twitter dot com, and it never occurred to me that I could just, I donât know, post them here? Maybe people would enjoy them more as easily linked back-to articles? So here goes.
Thereâs this weird propensity for game developers, after developing a great game, to make a sequel and add SMGs to it. This is the stupidest thing any game developer has ever done, and I hate SMGs so much that I feel forcibly compelled to explain why that is.
Okay, so, first person shooters. When Doom was birthed, fully formed, from the heads of two guys named John and actually a bunch of other people with names like Adrian and Tom, it set in stone some basic ground rules for how first person shooters ought to be made, apparently. One of the basic ground rules was this: players get pistols, shotguns, some kind of automatic weapon, and a rocket launcher. This is something literally every first person shooter does, even when it shouldnât. Thereâs also the BFG-9000 and the Plasma gun, but those are science fiction weapons, so not every shooter has âem in.
At some point, some genius ruined shooters by adding sniper rifles. What a horrible person.
Most other weapons have been gimmicks that no one else picked up, even when they were amazing, like Haloâs Needler, Half-Lifeâs Crossbow, and Turokâs Cerebral bore.
Only the pantheon remains consistent: pistol, shotgun, automatic rifle thing, and rocket launcher. Sometimes the rocket launcher gets swapped out for some other kind of âheavyâ weapon, but itâs pretty dang consistent.
So devs make the holy tr--quadrinity? quanity? idfk. Look, the point is, Devs do The Thing and then they make their shooters like it. Doesnât matter how good or how bad, this is just what people do when making first person shooters. Itâs a good thing, too. Pistol is âsingle shot gun,â shotgun is âinaccurate thing that fires multiple shots,â and rocket launcher is âsingle, slow-moving projectile that does splash damage.â
Then thereâs the automatic weapon. It was a chain gun/gatling gun type deal in Doom, but in other games, itâs often some kind of fully automatic rifle, like an M-16 or AK-47. It is the easy gun, the gun for bad players, the gun where you pull down the trigger and lots of bullets come out and theyâre tight enough to hit in the direction youâre pointing at and do damage, but inaccurate enough that someone will yawn âyes, itâs balanced,â and call it a day.
So far, so good. Not a great weapon type, but thatâs okay, shotguns are already perfect, so nothing else can be.
(most people get shotguns wrong; I wrote an article about that)
The assault rifle is pretty boring, all things considered. Itâs the gun that you use when youâre not in the fight to have an interesting time, just to get through the fight. You aim it, you pull the trigger, things die. Itâs the optimum gun--thereâs a reason the US Military doesnât equip everyone with a shotgun/rocket launcher loadout, after all.
So hereâs Johnny Game Dev, whoâs made a successful first person shooter, and everyone loved it, and everyoneâs happy, but now heâs got to make a sequel, and damned if he wonât add some kind of new gun to it. The problem is, heâs exhausted all his options. Heâs got the pistol. Heâs got the rifle. Heâs got the shotgun. Heâs got the rocket launcher. Maybe heâs got the sniper rifle too. Heck, maybe heâs even tossed in a grenade launcher and a plasma rifle.
Whatâs a game designer to do?
Johnny Game Dev invents the sub-machine gun.
Most guns classes are meaningfully differentiated from each other. That means your pistol doesnât fire rockets like the rocket launcher (there are rocket-propelled bullets, but they obviously arenât going to work like a regular rocket launcher would), and your automatic rifle isnât going to fire pellets like a shotgun would. Each gun has a specific, meaningful utility.
You might have a shotgun that fires slug rounds, but itâs still fundamentally a shotgun in that itâs a burst weapon, something that does a lot of high damage at the expense of reduced magazine capacity. Your rocket launcherâs all about projectiles that do massive splash damage, but they move so slowly that enemies canât dodge them, so youâve got to be smart about where you place your rockets.
Every gun has utility. The assault rifleâs job is to put a lot of bullets downrange where one of them will probably hit something, but also to be fired in quick bursts when the player wants to be more accurate. Itâs a weapon that fills two meaningful roles.
The SMG is dumb.
In real life, SMGs are meant to do the same thing that assault rifles do, but in a more compact form. You donât want cops carrying big, unwieldy rifles in urban environments; you want something that does the same bullet spray thing, but in a smaller package. This often comes at the expense of accuracy, because the weapons are short and the cartridges carry less propellant (I think thatâs the right term?). A longer weapon with faster bullets is going to be more accurate than a shorter weapon with slower bullets.
This isnât meant to be an in-depth explanation of how guns work, just a primer for explaining SMGs so we can get to the video games part. Anywho, lots of companies like KRISS (Vector) and FN (P90, which is a PDW and may not be considered an SMG, but whatever, itâs 2:28 AM), are working on making more accurate, heavy-hitting, but compact weapons. Itâs a whole thing.
In games, the SMG behaves exactly like the assault rifle. Of course, devs realize that there has to be some difference, so they make SMGs inaccurate, kinda like real life. Devs often take liberties with how guns should perform; pistols are REALLY accurate, but Shotguns have almost NO range. Totally not like real life at all, but whatever.
SMGs generally have a simple balance thing: faster fire rate, lower accuracy. Okay, cool, thatâs a reasonable thing to do, but that lack of accuracy means theyâre often nowhere near as effective as shotguns. They lack that sort of âdual roleâ of an AR, because you canât meaningfully burst-fire them for increased accuracy.Â
So itâs weird when a game makes an entire class of weapons around whatâs basically, functionally, a less-satisfying (unless youâre up close in PVE) subcategory of ARs, and less effective than a shotgun.
Consider Destiny, which had two basic archetypes of auto rifle; there was the super fast bullet hose, which had high ROF and high mag size but low damage, and the slower, heavier AR, which had low ROF and low mag size but high damage. These complemented each other well; you picked what you liked based on how it felt to use.
The SMG doesnât really fit in. It finds some utility in close range encounters, but in Destiny, most of your encounters are more likely to be mid range, now that shotguns are never useful at all, and melee abilities take like six times as long to recharge. Itâs just an auto rifle, but, uh, less good than the auto rifle. The auto rifle is going to resolve almost all fights better than the SMG.
Destiny did the same thing with pistols. Hand cannons were great. Then they added sidearms, which are just weak hand cannons, so they offset that weakness with bigger magazine sizes. The functional role hasnât changed--sidearms BEHAVE like pistols, and make players BEHAVE the same way, they just make players click more times to perform the same task.
Thatâs the problem with SMGs and sidearms and other âslight tweaks on a formulaâ weapons: they donât change how you play. Ideally, each gun in a shooter should make you behave differently.
In G1, we have very clear, broad archetypes. We have shotguns, which are gonna be these big high-damage burst-fire weapons. We have our handguns, which are high-damage single-shot weapons. On and on it goes. The idea is, each major gun family encourages players to behave in different ways. The grenade launchers and rocket launchers fit within the same class, even if they behave a bit differently (arcing projectile vs accelerated projectile).Â
This lets us work out the basics of how the gunâs primary fire mode is gonna work. We can be as flexible with this as weâd like with the secondary fire. This is fundamentally about a gunâs visuals communicating how it works to the player immediately and sorting them in the inventory. If you get a shotgun, youâll play it like you would a shotgun, even if, idfk, our secondary fire is a machine gun (tho Iâm trying to keep most of âem more exotic than that).
Thatâs my thought process.
Basically, a lot of guns that are very close together so as to be indistinguishable... shouldnât. Better to have 10 radically different guns than a bunch of archetypes that are only kinda different from each other. Put the SMGs and the auto-rifles all in one class and make âem different archetypes. Clearly define their roles so thereâs no pointless overlap with other weapon classes. Make âem worth using, instead of just being crappier auto rifles that are outclassed by those and assault rifles.
Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them âgood boyâ and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyoneâs a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and youâve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.
Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where youâre photographing what already exists, or a book, where you only have to use words to make things happen, a game requires loads of people to work extremely hard to build an entire reality. As a developer, you have to create spaces. You have to create physics. You have to control lighting. When two objects touch each other, you, the developer, have to ensure that they donât simply clip through each other. As a developer, you might slave away for years of your life, working impossible hours alongside dozens, even hundreds, of other people, to ship an entire hand-crafted universe.
Games are places you get lost in, and places you call home. Only in games can you travel places, talk to people, and live the impossible. Itâs why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. Itâs why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel youâve been waiting years for. Itâs why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. Itâs why you part with your hard-earned cash. You want to go there. You want to live that. You want to experience something new.
Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad dog, and I hate that I have to say that. Hundreds of people  put five years of their lives into Andromeda, but the end result was a disappointment. Due to a lot of complicating factors, they werenât able to make the game they wanted to make. Thereâs a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when youâre eating ramen every day in college, you want an escape. You save up. You budget. If the game is bad, you have no recourse. Good reviews donât necessarily mean youâre happy with what you got; after all, thereâs often a big disconnect between reviewer tastes and player interests.
So it makes sense to lash out. It makes sense to want to have some fun at the expense of the game that caused you so much trouble. It makes sense to want to joke and mock and scream about just how bad it is, and how mad you are that you wasted your time on a game that the publisher spent years promising you was amazing as fuck.
The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games. It was so good, I found myself swimming around the gameâs oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldnât have to leave. I didnât want it to be over. With Andromeda, I finally gave up on the side quests, focused on the critical path, and installed as quickly as I could after the credits rolled.
Developers have a tendency to be defensive, and itâs completely understandable. No one wants to feel like their time was wasted. The secrecy of development mean a lot of myths arise. Sometimes leadership makes poor decision, technology doesnât work like it ought to, pressures to hit deadlines lead to compromised work. You, the individual developer, do not have nearly as much power to make or break a game as players think you do. Itâs a miracle any game gets made. Even something like âopening a doorâ is incredibly complex. And thereâs no guidebook, no science behind it, no easy way to simply have an idea and make it work.
I say all this because I want set the ground rules. Weâre here to talk about why a game didnât work. Weâre not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and weâre not here to complain about the developers. Itâs human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and itâs just as human to want to avoid the blame. Iâm going to avoid human nature, cut through the bullshit entirely, and try to diagnose the product.
Andromeda had a metascore of 72. It sold so poorly that it went on sale today for $15--thatâs 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If youâre one of the two people I know who loved the game, Iâm not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didnât work for most people. I think we ought to find out why.
This is not a review, this is an autopsy. I am not here to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. Iâm here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, Iâm working on the assumption you havenât played the game, but I wonât be avoiding spoilers either.
So, now that weâve set the stage, letâs look at the game.
1. Narrative
Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. Thereâs some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, itâs completely its own thing. You, a human, and a bunch of aliens from the Milky Way have flown to the Andromeda galaxy in search of a new home. It took 600 years for your ships to get there.
Somehow, the Andromeda Initiative--thatâs the organization running everything--had the ability to see what the Andromeda galaxy looked like at that point in time, despite the fact that light takes about two million years to travel between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. At some point between the time you set off and the time you got there, a catastrophe occurred, and some weird, uh⌠like⌠energy coral spread throughout space.
On one hand, itâs sci-fi, so we donât need everything to be perfect. On the other hand, Mass Effect has always leaned a bit more towards hard sci-fi than most games. They acknowledge relativity frequently throughout the series--ships canât travel between worlds without using these big âmass relaysâ that were seeded throughout the galaxy millions of years before the story starts. Bioware created an element, Element Zero, to explain how how a lot of the tech in their universe functions. It was internally consistent.
Andromeda suddenly decides that ships can fly at something like 4200 times the speed of light, we can see a galaxy in real-time somehow (but only looked once), but we canât use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though thatâs a technology thatâs been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the seriesâ own rules to get to where it is.
This alone does not make Andromeda a bad game, but it does do a good job of illustrating a big problem: everything feels thoughtless. Iâm not sure how a game spends five years in development and has a script that seems so⌠careless. Nothing in Andromeda feels logical or natural. In writing, thereâs this idea called the âidiot ball.â It comes from the writerâs room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the âidiot ballâ one week, making bad choices that lead to the storyâs drama. It works in a comedy. Not so much in a game that wants us to take its narrative seriously.
The idiot ball is why the crew of an Andromeda Initiative Ark, the Hyperion, wakes up next to a planet that wasnât inhabited 600 years ago to discover that the planet is now uninhabitable and the aforementioned weird energy coral thing nearly destroys their ship.
Scientists are generally pretty careful. Donât get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but youâd think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I donât know, stopping just outside the galaxy, using their recon tech to see if anything had changed in six hundred years? Heck, why not stop outside the solar system to see if it had been colonized, or situations had changed? Of course they end up in a bad situation, because everyone in the game holds the idiot ball.
This isnât a new problem for the series--remember when a giant robot attacked the Citadel and destroyed most of the Council fleet, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, on the Citadel saw it and the robots murder lots of people⌠and then pretended the giant robot threat wasnât real? Mass Effect, starting with 2, has always had stupid people making stupid decisions that make no logical sense.
But--and this is incredibly important--they still worked, because they created dramatic moments.
Drama is the tension created by the conflict between a character, their goal, and the thing keeping them from attaining that goal. Itâs difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told theyâre the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesnât match the premise. Great drama has stakes that feel important and make sense. Characters who constantly make poor decisions lose sympathy, which reduces dramatic tension, and we, the audience, stop caring.
The Councilâs ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isnât surprising, since the entire game is a terribly-written mess. But at least it rings true! We can believe the government would ignore an imminent threat to our lives (see: global warming), and it makes us feel like we want to take action. Mass Effect 2âs âOh yeah? You donât believe in an alien menace? Well, Iâm gonna prove it to you!â is exactly what makes a game work, even if the setup is poorly done. As long as it delivers its dramatic payload, it works.
Andromeda has nothing like that. Everything is twee. Thereâs some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and itâs obvious who he is as soon as you meet him, even though he plays it coy. This Charlatan fellow vies for control over a tiny little spaceport on an uninhabitable planet. Heâs trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of âguards! Seize them!â I donât remember why I cared. I can remember every quest, every reason for doing anything in the first Mass Effect (Saren bad, Protheans cryptic, learn more about protheans, find Sarenâs base, interrogate Sarenâs sidekick), but in Andromeda, uhâŚ
Yeah. I just finished the game and Iâve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Donât get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.
Whatâs the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says âhey, itâs me, your brother! Iâm being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!â You wouldnât believe him. Itâs a case of someone telling you that theyâre important, rather than the person actually being important to you. I felt nothing saving the Earth. I felt a lot more when I lost Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 3. Bioware makes this mistake frequently in its A-plots, but it usually makes its character interactions matter so much more in the B-plots that we can overlook the main plot shortcomings.
Andromeda does the A-plot thing: everyoneâs lives are at risk unless you, the single most important human in the story, save them all. It just forgets to do the B-plot thing. There are nice little conversations between characters on the ship and in your party, as you might expect, but conversations with the characters are a drag.
Itâs a problem with the gameâs dialog on the whole. When you talk to anyone, they⌠well, they remind me a lot of that great liartownusa photoshop of a fake Netflix movie, âThe Malediction Prophecy.â
âIt's been 3,000 years since the Malediction, the spirit-plague created by The Order, a fabled army of immortals seeking to unravel the genome of the were-shaman Erasmus Nugent, who seeks to rebuild La Cienega, a bio-weapon capable of stopping Honcho, the deathless vampire king who sseeks to conquer the Fontanelle, the mythical fortress of demon hybrid Gary Shadowburn, who seeks to unleash angel-killer Larry Wendigo Jr., who seeks to release the Bloodfroth, a terrifying evil that seeks ot return the world to darkness.â
People donât talk like people talk. They talk like fanfiction writers write. Have you ever seen one of those cringe-inducing tumblr story ideas that is just so bad, because everyoneâs got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very âIâve only ever read YA fiction in my entire lifeâ?
Andromedaâs like that. People talk weird. They say things like âexcuse me, my face is tired,â and make jokes without charisma. I have this urge to be really critical of the writing team, because they had, I presume, five full years on this game, and they work at a company that is literally built to make story-driven games, and the end result is an experience worse than Dragon Age 2, a game that was rushed through development in 18 months.
I donât know how this script made it through editing.
This is the kind of writing we tore apart in our sophomore screenwriting classes back in the day. I can understand narratives not working on a larger, more plot-based level, because that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of teams. But basic dialog? How is it so bad?
Seriously, what is this? How did someone write this scene and go âyeah, yeah, this is good stuff.â How did this make it past animators and editors and marketing? How did this scene make it into the final game?
When your father sacrifices his life for you in the opening of the game, bestowing his role as Most Important Person to you, a character, apparently his friend, demands answers. She looks like Marge in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer uses a shotgun to apply makeup to her face. She asks you âwhat happened?â Your character, for some unknown reason, replies âto who?â Addison responds âitâs âto whom, and your goddamn father.â
I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guyâs Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say âyour goddamn fatherâ in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is âa dude we all care about just died.â It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go âuh, this makes no senseâ? What the hell happened? How did this make it into the game?
The game presents us with a myriad of unlikable characters who do nothing but screw things up--Tann, Addison, Kelly, and so on. I can understand that disaster can stress people, but I also know that, in the face of disaster, most animals, humans included, have a powerful tendency to stick together in order to face off against a greater threat. In the case of Andromeda, the vast majority of living beings you encounter in the game are Milky Way characters who chose to abandon the colony and become criminal scum in the process. That Sloane Kelly lady, whose name I only remember because I just looked it up? She was the chief security officer of the program. No one should be more highly vetted than she is, but no, after a few months, she cracks and starts a criminal empire.
Why is this story important? Game design is the art of getting players to perform specific tasks that bring about some form of emotional fulfillment. In other words, itâs about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, itâs hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyoneâs an idiot?
How does a game, from a studio known for its stories, suck this bad after five years of development time? How does that happen? Iâm exasperated with the game. I feel insulted by the script. I genuinely want to know how this game got as far as it did, because so many core ideas feel rotten from the get-go.
2. Technology and Presentation
Much has been made of Andromedaâs many animation glitches and bugs.
So, uh, just watch this vid if you want to understand how the game ended up:
Personally, I struggle with Frostbite, as an engine. EAâs doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EAâs development times have skyrocketed since switching from Unreal to Frostbite, and developers have complained at length about the engine. That Kotaku piece linked earlier indicated that wrestling with Frostbite was a big reason Andromeda took so long to develop.
On my computer, Frostbite games are among the buggiest, most unstable games I have. People complained about the load times in the Unity-powered ReCore, but Iâve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. Itâs a big issue with the engine. The lighting seems to work really well in the hand of DICE artists, but nobody else seems to have the hang of it.
Suffice it to say, the technology has been called out by a lot of people by now. The animations--in a game that was in development for five years--look worse than they do in an Unreal Engine 3 game from last gen. From a technical perspective, Andromeda needed more time on the cooker. Maybe six months of crunch would have done it, but that team was crunching for a while as it was. The end result was a game that simply does not compete with any other AAA game on the market.
But then thereâs the art.
Great fiction often relies on the power of its iconic imagery to engage the audience. Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies. Thereâs nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Biowareâs first three Mass Effect games were fantastically realized.
Mass Effect Andromeda seems like generic sci-fi art you can find anywhere. The alien Kett have some really cool Geiger-influenced stuff, but I couldnât begin to describe the other two alien species. Oneâs a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like Iâve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh⌠pretty normal. Nothing you havenât seen before.
Itâs all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities wonât surprise you. Seen the Giantâs Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.
Again, I donât really understand how, in five years, the art design ends up looking like⌠well, this. You know how people made fun of the suit design in Biowareâs other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. Itâs weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesnât have any creativity put into it.
And it sucks to say this.
It sucks to be so harsh. I wanted this game to be great. They were saying the right things about trying to nail that sense of exploration, and early plans for the game, as mentioned in the article I linked earlier, make it sound like they were going for a much more ambitious, exciting game, but they were hamstrung by the technology. That doesnât explain the writing or the art design, though.
As some of you may know, Iâm working on an indie game codenamed G1. I created it, wrote the plot, did most of the design work, stuff like that. Anyways, I wanted to create a really cool, distinct sci-fi universe that sticks in players minds as strongly as Star Wars or Half-Life does. Being a volunteer-only project for the time being (Iâd love to pay people, but I am so poor I literally went homeless this summer and am now staying with some family members who are in danger of losing their home as well!), weâve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the gameâs entire setting to a much less interesting, more generic environment. Later, we had some guys who were big fans of Ghost in the Shell and wanted to make our character art reflect that instead.
My point is, I get that a lot of people want to do what seems and feels familiar, but I think, for a big, AAA video game, distinctive is what people remember, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. Nothing looks like The Witcher 3, or Dishonored, or Halo, or the original Mass Effect trilogy, Half Life, or⌠well, you get the idea, right? Distinctiveness rules. Sameyness drools. And for whatever reason, Andromeda is the least-inspired AAA video game Iâve seen in a long, long time.
3. Design.
This, for me, is the big one. I can deal with bad storytelling in a game, because almost all game storytelling is garbage. I can put up with bad technology, because I grew up gaming on the PC, where modding could often turn my games into an unbearable slideshow, and sometimes, Iâve found games that were fantastic despite their poor presentation. But if the design is bad⌠then we got a problem.
And the design is bad.
As much as I want to speculate on why the design is bad, the truth is, nothing productive can come of that. I donât know why itâs bad. I donât know who made what designs, or how much the technology is to blame, or anything like that. All I know is that the design is bad, and Iâm going to tell you what makes it bad, so if you decide to develop a game in the future, you at least can be armed with the knowledge of what Andromeda got wrong, and hopefully avoid it yourself.
If you asked me to use one sentence to describe Andromeda, Iâd probably call it âa waste of time.â
I mean this literally. Iâve never played a game that wasted more time than Andromeda. Like⌠holy crap. So much time wasting. People complained so much about certain time-wasting aspects of the game, Bioware patched some of it out.
Hereâs an example, and Iâm going to italicize it so you can skip reading the whole thing if it gets too boring. Because it is super boring.
If you want to go explore the planet of Kadara, you have to go to the star system, which involves an unskippable cutscene as you âflyâ from where you are to where you were. Then, in the star system, you click on the planet, and you fly over to it. You fly too close to it, then zoom back out (this happens every time you move between planets in the game; I have no idea why). Then you rotate the planet on your display until you can select the city, which is on the opposite side of the planet from you.
Now click on that landing zone. You must then verify your loadout, because the game wonât let you change it without seeking out a loadout station, rather than just letting you open your menu and swap gear. You will be faced with an unskippable cutscene showing you landing on the planet. Then you will spawn somewhere thatâs nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the âgo to slumsâ option.
You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. Itâs a big, empty field, so this takes like 20 seconds to do. Jump over the fence. Run another 100 yards or so to a big terminal that lets you summon your car. Congratulations, you have finally spawned. Now spend ten minutes driving wherever you need to be around a planet thatâs a pain to drive around.
Every planet is this bad. Youâd think they might let you spawn wherever youâd like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, thatâs not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points arenât in convenient spots, but thereâs nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, youâre usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. Youâre going to spend a time walking across flat surfaces to get to where you need to go.
Contrast that with a game like Destiny 2, which has multiple spawns on each planet, and keeps the social areas with vendors nice and small, so thereâs not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the gameâs joyful movement system, as opposed to the flat, empty space in an Andromeda.
There are other ways it wastes your time as well. Consider the UI, which decides to put everything in a list. I do mean everything. There are something like 10 distinct tiers of weapon, for every single weapon in the game. Like the Dhan? Cool, your crafting list will include the Dhan I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, which is weird, because itâs a straight upgrade every time, so thereâs literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.
Chances are the Dhan X wonât be craftable, because thereâs no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldnât get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, itâs weird that theyâd put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. Thatâs like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you canât sort between any of them.
Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), youâre just stuck with a gigantic list, and for some reason, you have to carry them on you, even though the game only lets you swap them out at various stations. Wouldnât it make more sense to store the mods in the stations themselves?
You end up wasting so much time just navigating menus, trying to find the one thing you want, or being forced into seeking out the physical locations in game that will let you access the menus, because you canât swap items out at will⌠itâs frustrating.
Thereâs this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isnât a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I donât want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. Iâd much rather just press a button, open a menu, and swap my loadout there. Destiny got it right. Fable 3 did not. For some reason, Mass Effect Andromeda wants to be like Fable 3, if Fable 3âs weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.
Itâs awful. And I donât know how the game shipped like that.
But the worst thing of all is the mission design. If you've played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you know that the mission design was extremely repetitive. Every location you went to would have the same few basic missions, no matter where you went. It got predictable. Andromeda is the same way. Go to two big towers on the map, solve a puzzle, go to a vault, press a button, run to the end of the vault, voila, youâve done it. Scan a bunch of corpses on a planet. Pick up some rocks and plants. Go find the glowing orbs on the planet, and youâll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but donât look for the variety found in Inquisition, where every dragon had something unique going on that made it kinda cool.
On and on it goes. Every planet, the same thing. Thereâs a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and itâs not actually Meridian, but you donât know that until you get there. To proceed, you must go to two different towers, solve two puzzles, and then go to a third puzzle, and do a new thing. When you fight the final boss, you will have to engage two similar phases, followed by a third, more unique phase. Every single fucking quest in this game seems to be âdo two things, and then the third thing will be different.â
Find out who did a thing? Talk to two colonist, then the third one will say something different. Get artifacts for a museum? Three things. Every quest. Every single quest. Do three things, then move on.
I donât want to be the generic internet gamer type here and accuse the developers of laziness, but I can say that the end result feels lazy. I remember, years ago, a Bioware writer saying on their forums that Bioware had decided that three was the âperfect numberâ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but youâre wrong. Doing everything with the rule of threes sucks.
You know why? Because it robs the player of dramatic tension. Yeah. It all comes back to that. When you teach your players that theyâre going to do two meaningless things for every quest, the player stops giving a shit about your game. When you claim to be making a game about space exploration, but thereâs settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesnât feel like youâre exploring, it feels like youâre a space janitor.
The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games donât have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.
If players can predict whatâs going to happen in your game, the tension is lost, and the desire to continue is dampened. Word of mouth dies, nobody recommends your game to their friends, and your sales dry up and you canât even justify making DLC for your game.
Rule of three design is garbage. It is that simple. There is no case where it is great game design, ever.
I have no idea why Bioware decided to make a game with nothing but rule of three design, but they did. And even when they try to make it interesting, itâs not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me âI need a thing,â giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldnât help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasnât there. Thatâs two places where I wasted time not completing the objective. At the second place, I was told about some big bad gangster dude at the third place. I killed the big bad gangster dude without even realizing it at first. Got the part, went back to the first location, and ended the quest.
The stakes never matter in Andromeda. Youâll always be forced to do something pointless before you can do the thing that does matter. Once, I found a place on a map, but the door was locked, and I could not get in. I finally found the quest that let me in that location, but I had to go to someoneâs office. I went there. I tried to interact with a crate that obviously had loot in it, but I could not. Scanning something else gave me a map marker to the original location. I returned there. The door was open. It wasnât like Iâd found a key or anything, the door was just open. Then a vendor from the other side of the map showed up. We had a conversation. The next quest step was to see her⌠all the way on the other side of the map. Couldnât we have had the conversation while she was still at the first location? No? Anyways, it was only after this point that the chest became interactive, and I could sift through its contents.
Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin 2, where my excessive exploration has got me into numerous areas I shouldnât be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say âyeah, take the reward, itâs in that box over there,â but you stole it hours ago while you were sneaking around.
The game forces you around empty and pointless maps for no real reason at all. At least Bethesda places its objectives far across the map as a means of taking you through interesting and distracting landscapes. Thatâs part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.
Iâm not gonna lie, Iâd love to sit down with some leads at Bioware and talk about how to make their games better, because right now, their games seem formulaic as hell--Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda are virtually identical games in their broad strokes, with the only real differences being the result of the setting.
If youâre a professional writer, youâre probably going âwhy is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?â Well, Iâm being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what itâs like to play Andromeda.
Itâs a waste of time, and itâs broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I donât know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I donât know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I donât know why anyone recommended this game to me, because it is quite literally the worst AAA gaming experience I have had in years.
Ultimately, it comes down to drama. Nothing Andromeda does is dramatic. It tries to use dramatic music and awful cliches to make things feel dramatic, but it doesnât earn anything. The art isnât inspiring, the stakes are rarely, if ever, high, the quests are so predictable that all tension is gone.
And it sucks that I feel this way. It especially sucks because the game actually starts out being interesting, making you curious, prompting you to ask lots of questions. By the second planet, you realize just how predictable it all is. By the end of the game, youâre wondering why you stuck with it this long. That 40-or-so gigs of hard drive space would be better off empty.
There are so many other problems with the game. Why do most mods either have negatives that outweigh their positives, or positives so miniscule thereâs no point to using them? Does a 5% recharge timer in a 5 second timer really matter? Does a 3% damage boost on a gun with three shots have any perceivable effect? Nope. We could dive into the problems with dozens of quests, more specifics about the writing, and so many other things. Thereâs so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking itâs better than it is.
Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. Thatâs what gets players playing and talking. Thatâs why they spend money. If youâre not going to do that, donât bother making video games.
indie bundle cruft death match volume 5: thirty game special
Okay. So. The first time I did this, I only did like 10 games. 20 felt pretty good, so I started doing that. This time, weâre gonna do 30, so that it ends on an even 100. Then weâll go back to doing 20.
And here.
We.
Go.
EVIL GENIUSÂ is so good that itâs in my regular rotation of games now. Itâs basically a city builder, except itâs a base builder. Just scale down Tropico and youâve got it, more or less. I really like it, but all my dudes keep getting killed and I run out of money. Trying to figure out how to get past that right now. NO, MISTER BOND, I EXPECT YOU TO LIVE.
CASTLE CRASHERS is extremely good. Itâs a brawler. Itâs fun. You should play it. I canât believe I slept on it so long. SLAAAAAY.
CAYNE is an isometric adventure game from the creators of Stasis. I played the entire thing. Itâs free, but itâs good enough that I recommend buying the $6.99 DLC the developers released for it, to show âem your support. What a great thing that was. Some of the writing was predictable--heck, the ending was obvious--but I enjoyed it nontheless. If youâre a fan of Sanitarium, play this. If youâve never heard of Sanitarium... play Sanitarium. INCREDIBLE.
THE CAT LADYÂ is an adventure game, I guess? I didnât really enjoy what I played, so I gave up. ADIOS.
THE CAVEÂ wouldnât run at all. Black screen, no matter what I do. Shame on you, Double Fine, for releasing a game that is not fine, much less twice that. I have this game on Xbox 360 backwards compatibility somehow--probably through Games with Gold--so Iâll test it out there some other day.
CHAINSAW WARRIOR and CHAINSAW WARRIOR: LORDS OF THE NIGHT are tabletop games turned into video games. I wasnât really into âem, so theyâre going INTO THE DUNGEON.
As a platformer, CAVE STORY+ is not my cup of tea, and yet... I find myself enjoying it, somewhat. Enough to keep it around. WE SHALL CONTINUE.
CHAOS REBORN is a platformer/shooter thingy where you play as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, who dies in a single hit whenever he gets shot. Not really my jam. BANISHED TO THE NETHERWORLD.
CHERRY TREE HIGH COMEDY CLUB is a visual novel where pressing the screenshot button refreshes the game. Itâs got great ratings on steam, BUT I WASNâT LAUGHING.
CHOMPY CHOMP CHOMP is like Pac-Man kinda except there are four players and theyâre all trying to eat the one theyâre supposed to eat while avoiding the one they arenât supposed to eat. GAME OVER.
CINDERSÂ is a visual novel/RPG that retells the story of Cinderella. Itâs got great ratings on Steam, so if this is your jam, play it. Sadly, itâs not mine. NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER HERE.
CITIES IN MOTIONÂ is by the guys who later made Cities: Skylines. Itâs pretty neat. You basically manage a city transit company. I ran out of money in the tutorial. The interface is unwieldy. I like it! CHOO CHOO!
CITIZENS OF EARTH is a JRPG-style game, but youâre the Vice President of Earth. I find it charming. IT WINS THE ELECTION.
A CITY SLEEPS is a mixed-rated SHMUP from Harmonix. I had no idea it existed. Must have picked it up in a bundle? Didnât enjoy it much. GO BACK TO SLEEP.
CLICKR is a matching game, and if youâre into that, itâs probably great. Iâm not into that, so I canât really speak to its quality. I CLICKED CLOSE.
CLONESÂ features a kind of game design that seems familiar, but I canât place it. Dudes keep walkin, and all you can do is alter the level so they go the way you want them to. ADIOS.
CLOSUREÂ is a platformer where the only things that exist are the things you can see. So, uh, keep your light on. Quirky platformers and I donât really get along, and havenât since time immemorial. SHUT YOUR EYES.
CLOUDBUILT is a third person platforming game where I guess youâre an invisible psychic ghost of your sick and sleeping self? It felt... âoff.â Kinda like how Warframe feels âoffâ after youâve played Ninja Gaiden Black. The thing is, I like Warframe, even though itâs not Ninja Gaiden Black, so I thought I might keep Cloudbuilt around, but... ehnh. Truth is, I JUST WASNâT FEELING IT.
COBI TREASURE DELUXEÂ is basically a match 3 game combined with tetris. Itâs something Iâd probably play if I had literally nothing else to play. Itâs not offensively bad, itâs just not fulfilling what I get out of games. NO TREASURE HERE.
COFFIN DODGERS is Mario Kart but with old people who are trying to outrun death. DEATH CATCHES UP EVENTUALLY.
COIN CRYPT is actually kinda fun, but again, not really for me. I guess thereâs a coin-themed world, and you go around spending coins you find to battle people? Itâs got some kind of old console-game-that-thinks-itâs-an-rpg-but-there-is-no-roleplay thing going on. Itâs neat. Just... do I really want to keep playing? ALL OUTTA QUARTERS.
COLDFIRE KEEP is a first-person game, which sounds exciting, until you realize itâs one of those grid-based dungeon crawler type games, not, like, an actual first-person real-time game. Iâm not gonna lie, I donât actually understand the appeal of this kind of game. Why not let me walk around in real time? Why navigate awkwardly on a grid? I thought people only made this game due to tech limitations, not the aesthetic, since they basically died after Doom came out, other than Grimrock. Reviews said to play Grimrock instead. Also, hey, way too verbose, game. KEEP TO YOURSELF.
COMMANDER KEENÂ COMPLETE PACK may be an id game, but itâs a platformer, and, like... man, itâs a genre that just does not WORK for me. I wish it did. I mean, not wish strongly enough that if a genie gave me three wishes, Iâd ask the genie for the ability to enjoy platformers, but like, I feel my life would be a tiny bit better if I could enjoy platformers. IâM JUST NOT TOO KEEN ON THEM.
CONSTANT C is another platformer. Look, if you came to me wanting quality opinions on platformers, uh, donât... do that. Donât ask me about that. It is not something I am into. OUT LIKE A LIGHT.
CONTAINMENT: THE ZOMBIE PUZZLERÂ should have won me over, considering it features both zombies and match puzzles, especially because of itâs cool twist where you can only eliminiate zombies by matching people around them, but the zombies can infect those people... but I dunno. Maybe I donât like matching games unless they feature collectible Pokemon? That might explain my love of Pokemon Shuffle. These zombies, on the other hand, SHUFFLE OFF TO OBLIVION.
CORPORATE LIFESTYLE SIMULATORÂ is like... imagine Pikmin, but in an office, and you fight zombies, and the Pikmin elements are downplayed and nowhere near as deep as in Pikmin. Like, people follow you around the office, and they can kinda fight, I guess, but... it wasnât deep enough to be interesting. And maybe thatâs the point; the devs spent a lot more time on the playerâs personal combat mechanics, and it shows. If you want to brawl with zombies, enjoy it. WHERE YOU LEAD, I CANNOT FOLLOW.
COSMOâS COSMIC ADVENTURE. I didnât think they sell this one on Steam anymore, because I donât think the Apogee pack is available, but hey. I googled, and apparently they do. Still, itâs a PLATFORMER.
COSMOCHORIAÂ wouldnât let me take a screenshot because pressing F12 opens up its Chrome web inspection interface. Itâs kinda like if Mario Galaxy was a 2D game? That makes it a PLATFORMER.
COSMONAUTICA sounds like my jam: itâs a management sim where you fly a space ship around doing missions. Awesome, right? Well, the UI is a little clunky and the information is sparse, compared to a game like Caravan. Being able to manage a ship and stuff is super neat! Thereâs one problem: the devs abandoned it. If the game had some kind of main quest-line, and as far as I can tell, it doesnât, Iâd probably stick with it regardless. I donât experience performance issues or anything... but it kinda puts me in mind of Banished.
I enjoyed Banished for the time I played it, but the more I played, the more I realized I wasnât going anywhere. I was just kinda... figuring out how to optimally build a town, then doing just that. Repeatedly. I enjoy structure. The act of just flying around space, completing endless missions doesnât appeal to me any more than building a town and surviving as long as possible does. I need more than that. Neither game is bad... but I think this is why Caravan works for me so well. Itâs got a story. Itâs going somewhere. Iâm not just traveling between towns selling stuff. Iâm on a journey. LOST IN SPACE.
COSSACKS: ART OF WAR is basically just Age of Empires 2, judging by the tutorial, which makes it the best video game I have ever played that isnât Age of Empires 1, which most people donât like as much as Age of Empires 2, but I do, because it is the only video game I have ever experienced nostalgia for. No, really, that economic system is virtually identical to Age of Empires. GO FORTH AND CONQUER.
Itâs not like I hate the platforming genre, I just havenât found anything in it to love recently, yâknow? I enjoy Raymanâs 2D games. I like Conkerâs Bad Fur Day/Live and Reloaded a lot. But the other platformers, man... so many of them, they just donât excite me. I feel like Iâve seen everything they have to offer. Thereâs just âsome gimmickâ and a one or two button interaction with that. Sometimes you memorize button presses and repeat them before moving on.
âBut, Doc, you can reduce any genre down to that.â Ehnh... I disagree. Thereâs a randomness to other real-time games where you donât have to think about âwhen an enemy is gonna attack youâ or something. Thereâs a lack of decision making because all youâre doing is moving between two points on a 3D plane. I donât enjoy Pokemon Fire Red, a 2D game, for the âwalking on a 2D planeâ bit. I enjoy it for the monster catching/collection completion.
In platformers, that whole âmoving on a 2D planeâ thing IS the game. And that just doesnât get my motor running.
Have I talked about this before? I almost feel like I have.
Thatâs 100 games weâve done now. This time, we looked at 30 games, and six of them survived the culling, or 20%. This brings our total up to 78 games rejected, 22 kept. Since thatâs 100 games, itâs a 78% rejection rate. Neato.
