stompsite

[stompsite]

disrespecting players

So, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has this new thing, where you can “romance” whoever you want. In the latest DLC, one playable character, Kassandra, has a baby.

People are upset about this.

Why? It’s completely understandable. Since you can “romance” (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 don’t actually think I’ve come across a single straight romance option. So maybe that’s what you’re supposed to do canonically. But apparently in the DLC, Kassandra is framed as bi, not lesbian, and some people aren’t happy about that.

So, after about 3 hours of sleep this morning, I saw a tweet, and the tweet said, “Ubisoft sorry for shock Assassin’s Creed Odyssey DLC twist which ignores player choice.”

Now, that specific sentence stuck out to me, because it’s something I’ve seen before, and I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had there. I wasn’t focused on the Kassandra issue specifically so much as I was the idea of “when should player choice matter?”

Me being me, I replied to this with my belief that most of the time, player choice isn’t 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 “so that’s why we need X,” this time, let’s get the point out up front, then work backwards. Not my preferred way to go, but it’s more important to make sense than to be comfortable.

My feeling is, I might be saying something useful, but if I’m not thoughtful about how I say things, people might end up misunderstanding. Since the thing that inspired this thought process was Eurogamer discussing “respecting player choice,” but that choice was about sexuality, it can too easily come across as saying “player sexuality shouldn’t be respected.” And that’s obvious horse shit; player sexuality must always be respected, because that’s an innate quality of the self! You should never shit on identity. But... should “player choice,” as a generalized topic, actually be respected?

So, here’s 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 “actually you can’t be a lesbian” is a problem. But this doesn’t mean that we should cater to every player choice, and Eurogamer’s specific framing is what bothered me, because I think player choice doesn’t deserve the sanctity that it’s 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, there’s 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 “romance” her. I think she’s the only person you aren’t related to that you can’t woo.

I hate using “romance” as a verb. I hate the idea that you can “romance” anyone you see in a game, because that’s 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 “romance” Aveline, which really just means “interacting 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.” I hate elves, so I did everything I could to piss another character, Merill, off, but apparently maxing out your hate means she’ll move into your house and hatefuck you.

It’s so fucking gross to treat sex, in games, as a weird fucking carnival game where sex is the prize. Don’t do any of the actual work of a relationship, just, y’know, max out a meter and you’re owed sex by your subordinates. You can see how that’s… a bit troubling, right?

Now, I could level this criticism at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. But, hey, this isn’t an essay about how bad Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is at relationships. I mean, it is, because “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey being so bad at relationships they literally invalidate player choice and it’s understandably upsetting people” is the thing that got this started, but what I’m 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.

I’m 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, you’re 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 else’s shoes.

But then there’s 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. It’s all good.

That’s really cool! Being able to customize that experience is really awesome. In an earlier essay, I discussed how “being able to visit another world” 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 “being who you want” and “engaging with the world on your terms” and I don’t 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 sim–a genre that’s about existing in another world–based around the idea of being a thief. One of the reasons that Thief is compelling is that… well, you’re 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 decisions–even wrong ones. When people argue that games should always result in a favorable outcome that “respects their decisions,” 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 I’m establishing that there are two kinds of games. For the sake of argument, let’s 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 don’t allow them to treat all games like a playground. I think immersive sims–or any game trying to let players exist in a world–are necessarily player agnostic. I think these games should acknowledge your decisions but that doesn’t mean respecting them. Sure, you built a character for stealth, but the guy you’re going up against was characterized as paranoid and has cameras everywhere; maybe that level is impossible to stealth. The game isn’t bad because it doesn’t let you play according to your build, it’s giving you a believable, interesting world.

Now, maybe you just want Ultimate Stealth Game Playground, in which case, I’d like to introduce you to Ghost Recon: Wildlands, a wonderful game I’ve put 48 hours into. That is a playground, and it’s a really good one.

I think we should respect choices when they’re about players defining themselves in games that are built around players defining themselves, like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a game that was heavily marketed as letting you choose your sexuality. I don’t think we need to respect every single player choice because I don’t think the player should have their every whim catered to.

I feel like a lot of this ties into the idea of “power fantasy.” I think power fantasies can be great. Sometimes it’s 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 “everyone should fuck me if I want them to.” I think that’s gross.

A world cannot be authentic if it can only respond positively to the player’s interactions.

If a player’s 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. They’re not satisfying because you can’t make wrong decisions; you can’t mess up. As a result, there’s 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.

That’s not an interesting relationship to the experience. It’s not really one I want to have.

So. Yeah. You should be able to define your character. That’s 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 Kassandra’s sexuality) should be respected. I think there are plenty of decisions that should not. I think games are interesting when they’re 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.

I’m just... feeling like I’m seeing people around this discussion arguing that all games should allow all decisions all the time, the player’s position within games is sacred, games should never ever under any circumstances present players with bad choices, and I’m uncomfortable with that ‘cause I think it leads to weird situations like the one with “Aveline owes me sex in Dragon Age 2 because I want to have it with her” which is weird and gross.

[stompsite]

Let’s Talk Remedy

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 they’ve been influencing my understanding of game design ever since. What makes Remedy such an inimitable force in the video game industry? Well, that’s what we’re here to discuss.

Since this is a video about a particular studio’s game design, let’s 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 player’s 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 we’re here to talk about game design, which means that we’re 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 that’s important to keep in mind in any game design discussion. We’re here to look at problems and solutions, and, hopefully, learn from them.

Remedy’s 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, couldn’t hold a candle to Max Payne. The game’s 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 didn’t commit. And, most importantly of all, Max Payne’s 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 it’s 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 Payne’s 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 “well, I could’ve dodged that if only I’d been a bit better at the game.”

This mechanic draws you into Max’s headspace; you’re 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. You’d be surprised at how many games with weak core gameplay can get away with seeming like great games just because they look nice.

What’s great about Max Payne is that it’s 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 there’s 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 Payne’s 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 they’ll get hit when dodging, whether there’s 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 “when will the next guy pop out of cover?” 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 can’t see over, they’re 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 isn’t the only way to make movement feel good. Another important element is responsiveness; great animations look nice, but it’s 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 they’re 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.

There’s 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 that’s what Max Payne excelled at.

Once you’ve nailed movement, the way Remedy has, you’ve 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, you’ve already won half the battle. Give them a nice, aggressive sound and make ‘em look flashy, and you’re halfway to pleasing the audience. The next step is to make weapons interesting, but this is harder to do when everything’s inspired by real life; you can’t make a gun that shoots a land-swimming shark when you’re trying to use real-world weapons. Remedy does some really interesting stuff with player action, but before we get too into that, let’s 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; Remedy’s games always highlight the last enemy kill in a room, so it’s always clear to players that it’s 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 it’s indirect. A man who says “ah, you have killed me” 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 “I’ve been framed and need to clear my name” 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 “they kidnapped my significant other and I have to get them back” thing, but they fail because the audience doesn’t know the significant other, so they don’t care nearly as much as the protagonist does. This story failing is called “assumed empathy.” Audiences are inherently skeptical; you can’t just tell someone “you care for this person because of a relationship you don’t feel.” It won’t 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 she’s his wife, but because it’s his fault. The player can connect with that much easier. They’ve 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 Wake’s 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 they’d 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 it’s 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 it’s repetitive. They’re wrong, but they don’t 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 weren’t 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 isn’t 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 you’re playing alongside other characters; when you’re in the forest, you’re usually alone. The slower exploration sequences are rarely criticized because there’s so much detail and enjoyable Remedy writing to find there.

In the forests, it’s 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. Bungie’s 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 Remedy’s.

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 would’ve 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 enemy’s advance; you have to shine your light on all the enemies to make them vulnerable, but you can’t 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 aren’t 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 ‘repetitive,’ even when all the encounters are unique; the tactics haven’t changed enough to feel fresh.

Alan Wake is, in other words, a flawed but brilliant game. It’s got some amazing encounters that change up the rules, but an unfortunate number of encounters that don’t 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 there’s too much of it to allow for the snappy immediacy of Max Payne 2.

You end up with this game that’s pleasing for some players and offputting to others. I love Alan Wake; I know so much of that game like I’ve lived in its world my whole life.

Two years later, Remedy addressed some of these problems with Alan Wake’s 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 wasn’t 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.

Let’s say you have a great third person shooter. You’ve nailed movement. You’ve got great combat thanks to good enemy variety and weapons. You’ve got great feedback because the game responds to essentially every player action.

What then?

Remedy’s 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 Remedy’s most interesting game yet; the player has more powers than they’ve 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, there’s an issue with the protagonist, who is… some guy. Sorry, I actually have no idea who he is. I mean that. It’s a guy who goes “my best friend wanted me to drop by, so I did.” Max Payne is a cop whose wife and child died in a tragic accident. Alan Wake is a writer suffering from writer’s block who’s been tricked into seeing a doctor by his caring wife. Jack is… a… guy. He doesn’t 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 can’t remember if time actually dies or not. Literally have no idea what happened there.

It’s the first time I ever felt a Remedy story was forgettable. I don’t know who the characters are,  I certainly don’t care about them, the stakes are “time is breaking” which I don’t really understand? Like, what is there for me to care about here? I’ve got nothing.

But let’s 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 that’s about it.

The enemies stop being interesting pretty early on and they’re rarely surprising. Remedy’s always had some issues with variety, but the encounters made up for it; Quantum Break’s encounters rarely stand out for me. It’s 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 it’s pulling off its breathtaking environmental time twisting.

Worse still, the controls seem less precise. I’m not sure what happened here. Alan Wake wasn’t 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 I’m complaining? I’m sorry.

I genuinely love Remedy’s trademark detailed worlds; they’ve always had this cool sense of “if you think you ought to be able to interact with it, you can,” and that’s just as true here. There’s so much stuff to find in the world. The detail is breathtaking. The game is gorgeous. The architecture is, without a doubt, the best I’ve personally encountered in a game. As presentation goes, Quantum Break is the best of the best.

But… when I’m fighting the same guys over and over as a guy whose plight I don’t really care about, it’s hard to get attached. The movement mechanics are cool, especially then they flow together, but sometimes they don’t 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 didn’t seem anywhere near as good as the writing I’ve 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, I’m sad.

Now I hear Remedy’s working on a sequel to Crossfire, one of the most popular games in the world; I guess they’re doing contract work for a single-player campaign or something? That’s pretty cool. I know they did some mobile stuff for a while. After Alan Wake’s 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 Break’s disappointing reviews (it’s Remedy’s worst-performing retail game on Metacritic), I’m 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 won’t be repeated. I’d 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.

I’m excited to see where Remedy goes next. I’ll play whatever they make. Control looks amazing and I can’t wait to see Crossfire 2. The studio oozes talent and class; it’s one of the few studios I wish I could work for. Whatever the case is, even after a game that disappointed me, I’m a big admirer of their work, and I always will be.

[stompsite]

Dreaming Of Another World

It was all Narnia’s fault.

I grew up in a deeply religious family, one that eschewed ‘worldly’ media for the religious variety. I remember Dad dragging us out of a showing of the Lion King one rainy September day--I think we’d 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 “New Age Philosophy,” 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 Grandma’s 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 weren’t 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 Wendy’s (McDonald’s wasn’t allowed due to the oil they used), and we watched all of Grandma’s 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, y’know. 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 Hyram’s place watching The Magic School Bus, a show that we weren’t allowed to watch at my house because of the magic. Hyram’s 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. It’s villains were literally Satan and a Vampire. There’s an episode where one of the kids is told her mother doesn’t love her and as a result, she’ll 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 I’d 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 I’m sorry for that, but I feel it’s 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 I’d 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t 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 I’d 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 didn’t elicit the same response, so I didn’t 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. I’d 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 couldn’t 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. I’d 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 I’d 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 you’re familiar with these games, you’ll 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. STALKER’s world especially feels completely alive. System Shock 2 does a bangin’ job of making you feel like you’re really exploring an abandoned spaceship. Far Cry 2’s 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 who’d grown up reading the old Microsoft Flight Simulator tagline “As real as it gets,” I felt right at home.

I tried other games, like Nintendo’s platformers or controller-centric spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry 3, but I didn’t like them. They were too obviously games. You got points. Everything was abstract. I was playing. I wasn’t 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. I’m reminded of Lord Foul’s 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 “engrossed,” 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 you’re 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 “immersive sims.” Some people will argue that they are not engrossed by those games, so they cannot possibly be immersive, but I’d argue that when you’re immersed in something, it surrounds you, you’re 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 Blackley’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser, or Warren Spector and Harvey Smith’s 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 wasn’t 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 Blackley’s 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, they’d 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 couldn’t pay them. Talent moved off to other studios. Eventually, they shut down.

A few developers tried to carry the torch. Ken Levine’s 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. Bethesda’s work has become increasingly Looking Glass-influenced over the years. Clint Hocking’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 clearly learned from Looking Glass’ 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 I’ve always been fond of their intriguing stabs at realism; on its highest difficulty, Crysis’ enemies speak Korean, making it difficult for most players to understand their callouts. Crysis lets players use the game’s 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t the critical or commercial success Ubisoft hoped. STALKER was one of the buggiest commercial games I’ve ever played, capable of crashing if you so much as blinked, so it didn’t 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, I’d 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 wasn’t 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. I’d 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 I’d played the entire thing. As soon as I scraped the cash together, I bought myself a copy. It was the first game I’d 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 it’s 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 they’d had more time, I think it would have been rightly hailed as a masterpiece; as it stands, it’s 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 yet…

Something felt off.

Not about Dishonored, but about the conversation surrounding immersive design. I’d 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 weren’t commercially viable. Many agreed with him.

After the apparent sales failings of Prey (Arkane), Dishonored 2, and Mankind Divided, I’ve heard those conversations picking up again.

I think they’re wrong, and I’d 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 you’ll 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 you’ll hear them talking about… well, other things.

One thing I feel like I see a lot is an emphasis on stealth mechanics. That’s great! I love stealth games. But I’d argue that stealth is not an important part of immersive games. Some people have told me that they don’t think Bethesda games are immersive sims because the stealth in those games is nowhere near as in depth as Thief. Maybe, maybe, but here’s the thing:

I think you could make an immersive game where you’re 12 years old and you’re 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, you’re going to have the immersive sim community types talking about how important stealth is. Thief is good, but get over it. It’s 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; they’re high-intensity, high-stakes games that, when you play them well, make you feel like a real master. I’d also argue that stealth is exhausting. Maybe I’m more attuned to this than most due to the whole chronic fatigue thing, but like…

In a stealth game, success can feel like failure. You’re constantly feeling the pucker factor. If you are seen, you fail, even if the game doesn’t 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 wasn’t able to do what I wanted to; I messed up. I’m 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.

I’d argue that most people feel this way when playing stealth games. They don’t 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 that’s probably why Far Cry 5 is the best-selling video game of 2018 so far (Red Dead releases tomorrow).

I love that we’re making stealth games with immersive elements, but I think we’re 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 they’re also so very focused on stealth (the ones I’ve played are all among my favorite games, by the way! Please don’t think of this as a knock against them!). I can’t think of any game that claims to be influenced by immersive sims that doesn’t have stealth.

Stealth is a verb (short version: game design speak for ‘thing you can do’). It is not the genre.

Then there’s the whole “design” 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, I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll just say that Mario Feels Like A Game.

That’s not a bad thing, but, like, you’ve got this for, so you know what I’m about. You can see why that might not appeal to me personally.

Buuuuuuut… a lot of the newer, like… I don’t know, it’s weird to call them “design-focused,” 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 you’ll see The Person You Can Talk Your Way Past If You Have That Skill, you’ll see The Lasers You Can Sneak Past If You Can Turn Invisible, you’ll see The Vending Machine You Can Lift If You Have The Strength Ability, and you’ll see The Air Vent You Can Crawl Through To Get To The Computer You Can Hack If You’re 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 you’ve 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 there’s no reason to) for Maximum Points. It… it makes no sense. You’re 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.

It’s 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 game’s 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 don’t want games to do it to me too. I just want to act in a way that feels appropriate.

In Eidos Montreal’s 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 designer’s 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 don’t 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 I’m supposed to deploy them. See, there’s 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:

It’s not bad.

It’s good.

It’s 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 that’s… 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 can’t help but feel my own needs and interests aren’t 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 didn’t 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 you’re there.

I couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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. It’s 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 “hey, please help me take out this facility,” that’s 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. STALKER’s 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 “your way” doesn’t mean four skill trees, it means “here’s a real, tangible space, with no hint of the designer’s 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.”

STALKER feels natural.

In fact, if there was one word I’d use to describe my ideal immersive game, “natural.” 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 they’re bad. Everyone hits hard, so it’s 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 System™, recharging your Buddy Meter® so your Buddy® 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 2’s 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. “Why don’t you just chop down a tree to cross the river?” came the reply. The storyteller said they rolled their eyes at this and thought their mom was crazy, but later, they were like “actually, yeah, why can’t I do that?”

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 I’m 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 Wild’s 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 Designer’s Hand is invisible.

This brings me to Bethesda.

Yes, sure, if you’re an RPG fan, Bethesda probably isn’t 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 you’re on an urgent mission. The modular system design makes the world feel super artificial, and you can exploit the game’s systems in dumb, unrealistic ways, like putting a bucket on a person’s head (the AI has no sense of personal space and doesn’t mind) so he can’t 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, you’re 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. It’s going to depend as much on who’s in the fort as it is on you. Heck, I think in Skyrim, if you’re wearing Imperial gear, you can walk into an Imperial fort without anyone realizing you’re 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, you’re going to find places you can’t 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 it’s 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 it’s because they’re actually trying to send their players to other worlds. They’re not demanding you play stealthily, they’re not giving you the same routes so that every player can play One Specific Play Style. They’re 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 I’m at is… we saw one studio trying incredible things in games, and they went under through little fault of their own. Their successors didn’t find the smashing success that the enthusiasts think they deserve, but I think that’s 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 genre’s 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; they’re not making the kind of games Looking Glass was, no matter how much they claim that they are.

There’s too much artifice in the inheritors.

Bethesda’s 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, it’s great. I love it. It’s wonderful and beautiful and fascinating, but when I see people arguing that “nobody wants immersive games,” because those games didn’t break sales records, I want to scream “how would you know? You’ve made something else!”

STALKER sold like 6 million copies. Skyrim’s 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 it’s got some of the most sophisticated immersion elements in video games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of the “could this realistically work?” games out there and it made a ton of cash. When you make a game that’s 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, you’re making a great video game, but you aren’t making an immersive one. That’s okay, but please don’t argue that we should stop making immersive games because your model didn’t work. The immersive model is thriving. You just made something else.

I just want to escape to other worlds.

[stompsite]

How Do You Make A Great Quest?

Imagine this: you are working on a game, and you are responsible for designing a quest. It might not have that name, but that’s 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 can’t finish the story without it, or something else. How do you make a good quest?

Alright, now imagine something else. Imagine you’re a player, and you’re 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 Bogbort’s whereabouts, you amble into the nearby tavern, where the barkeep tells you that he’ll 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 “well, I’d love to help you, but right now, I’m trying to help Sadie Jenkins with A Personal Problem, so if you want to know where Bogbort is, you’re going to have to find Sadie. I think she’s at the market. If not, ask around, and I’m sure someone will tell you where she is.”

So you go the market. She’s not there, because of course she isn’t. So you find someone who says she’s at the tavern, so you go back there, but she’s 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 she’s surrounded by goblins! So you fight the goblins, save her, she says “thank you, I need to gather my thoughts, go back to the priest and tell him you helped me out.” So you go back to the priest, and he tells you that he knows Bogbort had been somewhere else, and if you went there, you’d probably find some clues.

Here’s why precisely none of that is fun.

First off, we’ve got our generic starter tutorial. It’s a standard fetch quest, which means someone wants you to go do mindless busywork for them. You know it’s busywork, they know it’s busywork, literally none of it is fun. More importantly, you know the outcome of the quest. It’s 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 “best quests in a video game ever.” Nobody even remembers them, except for the mild frustration at feeling the intense friction of “you are a mighty hero, now go take out the trash.” You’ve almost certainly heard of someone, somewhere, telling you how bad fetch quests were, and if this piece was just about fetch quests, I wouldn’t 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. It’s 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. It’s 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 I’m not here to say “don’t use The Rule of Threes in your game design.”

Consider Sadie’s quest. Let’s say we completed the objective four times. Go to the market, she isn’t there, go to the tavern, she isn’t there, go to the library, she isn’t there, go to the graveyard, she’s there. We still run into the same problem we had before. The quest is still predictable. It still feels like busywork. It doesn’t match up with the fantasy we’ve established for our character. It’s mindless and dull.

But most importantly?

It’s 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 “well, the person isn’t here,” that’s nowhere near as interesting.

There’s 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* — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.

BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. 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 DON’T 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 “LITTLE” 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 WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.

Why he wrote it in all caps, I don’t know, but the point is simple: if your scene isn’t dramatic, people won’t care. If people won’t care, then they aren’t going to want to keep playing. You know about those crazy stats that say most people don’t even finish games? Look at the completion stats for short games--they aren’t completed any more than long games are. Length was never the problem. It was always about whether or not people cared. People don’t care about nondramatic quests.

When you give someone a rule of three quest, you’re telling them what’s 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 isn’t fun. Fighting the exact same group of enemies isn’t fun. It’s 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 they’re 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.

Let’s not forget, our question, our very important question, wasn’t “what makes a bad quest?” it was “how do you make a good quest?” To understand what makes a good quest, we have to understand this one, simple thing: no drama makes bad quests. Drama makes good quests.

“Wait!” protests the reasonable game developer, “we’re not wealthy! We don’t have infinite budget! One of the reasons we do fetch quests and rule of three quests is because making custom assets is expensive!”

Yeah. That’s 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 3’s quests, so I figured the quests would be great. They weren’t.

Now, I could just shrug it off and hypothesize that these people lacked some “secret sauce” 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 let’s 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 game’s 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 wasn’t great because it had unique mechanics, it was great because it contextualized those mechanics in interesting ways. There’s 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 aren’t 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. It’s fun. It’s memorable because it fits with the character. The quest steps seem frivolous, but they’re fun games you play at a party, not boring quid pro quo chores. It’s 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

Doesn’t seem that dramatic, but the context (humans have been turned into pigs!) and the fact that it’s hilarious being a grown man talking to pigs and hoping they’re humans that were turned into pigs and not just normal pigs.

The Witcher 3’s quests often rely on narrative progression; rather than “go to one hut, go to the second hut, go to the third hut where the pigs are,” you think there’s 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. There’s a sense of progression, rather than feeling like you’re performing a lot of useless action.

The other game had none of this. It was a lot of “search in this circle for x number of things,” or “get me y number of pelts.” It was busywork that didn’t match the character, that didn’t serve any purpose other than to be an arbitrary progression gate.

Good quest design is good storytelling. Good storytelling matters; there’s a reason each scene or beat is there. Turning three cranks to open a floodgate or something isn’t 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 doesn’t excite them, then we’ve failed to make great quests.

[stompsite]

So I Played FFXV

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 I’m 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 we’re rarely wrong about our feelings, but we’re often wrong about why. If I wrote “here’s a good zombie game,” no one would want to read that if they don’t like zombie games. By writing “this is why zombie games bore you and here’s how zombie games can excite you,” 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 aren’t as familiar with the subject as they are. When I wrote about walking sims last year, I sat down and I went “okay, a lot of you are bored with walking sims. Why is that?” My editor’s boss didn’t seem to like it that much, insisting that the walking sim didn’t 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 didn’t grow up with video game consoles. I saw a meme posted the other day saying “you can’t argue with me about games unless your first console was a Genesis or NES.” Mine was an Xbox 360, but I’ve been playing computer games for a great deal longer. Since Japan didn’t make many computer games (oh, sure, Final Fantasy VII was developed for Windows 95, but I don’t 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.

It’s not to say that JRPGs weren’t appealing. When my wisdom teeth were pulled, my mom brought our little 13” 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 I’d seen up to that point was the stuff we got on kid’s 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, I’ve loved good anime aesthetics, so you’d 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. “...but Final Fantasy VIII is better!” they’d tell me, and of course I’d ask them about that, and they’d 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, that’s 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 ‘real’ canon name but I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know--and I couldn’t beat any of the fights because I didn’t 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 Dragon’s Dogma, and that was more of an open world sandbox game than any kind of RPG.

This brings me to another point.

JRPGs aren’t RPGs.

People usually protest when I make this point. Either I’m wrong or it doesn’t matter, they say, but I think it does matter because I’m 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 “I want to make an RPG,” chances are, I will not make something like a JRPG. If I say “I want to make a JRPG,” 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 isn’t there.

Judging JRPGs by their own standards lets us see these wonderful games for what they really are. JRPGs are not RPGs from Japan. They’re not even RPGs. Once, when I made this argument, a guy fought back by arguing that a game wasn’t an RPG unless it had a party (Witcher 3 doesn’t), a bestiary (pretty sure New Vegas hasn’t got one), was turn-based (quick, someone tell Dragon Age!), and had a linear narrative (hahahahahahaha!).

“But you’re playing a role!”

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 that’s 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 I’ve 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 Noctis’ 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 isn’t a great game, but one I enjoyed well enough, let me set my character’s 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 can’t really control how your character’s stats changed.

None of this is bad! It’s 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 can’t 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 that’s good.

The Game:

When it comes to Final Fantasy XV, this is the foundation I have. I’m vaguely turned off by all the stories I’ve 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, here’s the deal: you’re 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, who’s the princess of a rival kingdom, I guess? Except the wiki says she’s 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 don’t really know what’s going on there.

The wiki also says she’s the “main heroine” of the game, even though she barely has any screen time at all. She has magical powers that cures people of some weird plague that’s making nights last longer, except that the nights are still getting longer and more people are succumbing to the plague, so she’s really bad at her job.

Honestly, she’s just there to look pretty and say things like “Noct, please hurry.” 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 isn’t like Alan Wake, a game that reveals over time the complex nature of Alan’s 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 “Alice is Alan’s wife,” 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 there’s never any real love there, so there’s no urgency to actually chase her down, no sense of loss when she dies. It’s not all her fault though (I mean, duh, it’s Square’s fault). Noct is equally culpable. He’s just… kinda empty. He’s a shell who occasionally feels things when the script calls for it (ur dad died, be sad, ur gf died, be sad), but who doesn’t feel like a real person. I don’t really care about anything Noct wants. I just kind of do the objectives because they’re what’s 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.

“Yup,” I found myself thinking when I finished it, “this is exactly like every JRPG that has ever been described to me except Earthbound.”

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 isn’t epic at all. It’s a hodgepodge of ideas. Maybe other JRPGs do a better job, but based on every other JRPG I’ve played, like Xenoblade Chronicles and Suikoden, it’s 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 “male as default.” A lot of this is rooted in idiotic Freudian psychology (especially all the Lacan stuff), so it’s as bunk as astrology, even when it sounds good, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here: all media has a perspective, and most media’s 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 doesn’t mean they’re American movies. I’m not just talking geography, I’m 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 monolith…

...and yet…

...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 you’re 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 “why do you make American films? All films are American!” But there is something specific there. Something interesting.

Maleness is the same way. It’s 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 didn’t see it because it was so big I thought it was the ceiling. Maleness in fiction is like that; it’s rarely examined closely because it’s 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 we’re 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 they’re really only doing it to say “look what’s bad about being a man,” 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, they’re ostensibly on the run and simultaneously on their way to a wedding, but that doesn’t 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 he’s 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 Iris’ day. Prompto’s lower-class upbringing means he’s tremendously insecure about his relationship with the other boys. They’re 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 he’s their brother and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s something else that I’ve never been able to put into words. It’s a feeling I have occasionally, and one I cherish. When interacting with most men, there’s a degree of camaraderie, like, hey, we’re all on the same team, we’re cheering alongside each other, that kind of thing. There’s a whole second language that men are only capable of employing with other men that’s 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 you’d fuckin die for each other if you had to. When you do things together, there’s 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, it’s different than if you help your next door neighbor who you don’t really know all that well.

I’m sure other, better writers have written about this sense of brotherhood. When I’m 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, it’s 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 “yeah, bro, let’s go running in the sand and whoever outruns the other is the winner!” 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 ‘em.

And it’s still… dumb and flawed at times. I think I would’ve liked a more interesting protagonist and central conflict. I think the game is at its best when you’re 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 didn’t 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 it’s being personal, but it sucks when it’s trying to do all this other stuff. There are no affectionate moments between Noctis and Lunafreya. Mister Badguy, whose name I forgot and don’t feel like looking up because fuck that guy, he was boring, has to exposit his backstory (i was gonna be king but then i didn’t get to be king so i decided to have my revenge in like 2000 years’ time! mwahahaha!!! here is my entire personal history!) instead of just being interesting on a dramatic level.

It’s bad when it’s trying to be a grandiose RPG. It’s great when it’s doing something I can’t 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. That’s where the fun lies.

What about the gameplay?

The gameplay is kind of neat. Some stuff doesn’t 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 “needing to fill up with gas” 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 it’s all wrapped up in a real-time action game that’s nowhere near as satisfying as Dragon’s Dogma or Ninja Gaiden or something. I’m not saying it has to be, but holding down a button and watching your character autoattack isn’t very fun. Zipping around with your teleport power is totally awesome though.

Magic is super strong and I probably should’ve 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 doesn’t seem possible considering the game’s content.

Quest design isn’t great; most of it’s just random fetch quests. The open world itself is nice most of the time, especially when you have a chocobo, but because the game’s so invested in making you feel like you’re 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.

There’s 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 isn’t there. That’s not what makes FFXV good. The camaraderie is. The vibes are. Listening to the sizzle of ignis’ cooking or watching a huge monster fly in from above. There are so many incredible moments in this game. It’s too bad the narrative and the combat couldn’t 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 it’s a big, bombastic 3D game, it can’t 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 there’s really nothing else like it out there.

[stompsite]

Warframe vs Disability

A while ago, I read something that confirmed a suspicion I’ve held for a long time: video games are great for people who deal with chronic pain. It was relieving to learn that I wasn’t doing anything unhealthy or wrong; I was managing my own pain the best I could, and I wasn’t 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 body’s muscles. Games are a wonderful escape.

Unfortunately, action is a double-edged sword. While it’s 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 it’s like to live in my skin, that’s 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 can’t handle.

I don’t 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 isn’t getting medical attention and I can’t afford good food, I’m spending a lot of time indoors. Most of my friends are online, and it’s 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 “Warframe,” is like a hero in a hero shooter. There’s 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 that’s 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 that’s perfectly balanced between awesome design and tremendous power.

Her name is Ember.

She’s 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 “world on fire,” 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 there’s always something to do, always something new to try. That’s what makes them fun. You can’t 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 lethality — while many Warframes specialize in certain mission types, Ember’s specialty is “anything under level 30”. 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 ability’s 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 “set and forget” 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.

Here’s 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, you’re 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 can’t play her well these days. If you want to play a less active frame, you’ve got options like Hydroid, who isn’t really that fun to play — you can turn into a slow-moving puddle or summon a really small field of tentacles that does hardly any damage — or Nekros, who… well, same thing. A lot of the less active frames aren’t really that fun to use, or, like Limbo, can be straight-up infuriating to your teammates (Limbo’s whole deal is banishing players to another dimension, making it a pain in the ass to loot things, and in a looter shooter, this isn’t 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 isn’t great at damage on higher levels, but can help slow down crowds a bit through the power of Firequake. With an absurd range, she’s 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 “AFK-frame.” 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.

That’s 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. There’s just only so much button-pressing I can do in a day. For an active player like me, World on Fire was great; I’d 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 now — seriously, visually it looks like I’m maybe casting at sub-10 meters, which isn’t great in a game where you can cover like 30–40 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. She’s much less so now. I still play her because, like I said, it’s 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 I’m excited to try out ship to ship combat, but the thrill just isn’t there these days.

I replayed some Halo with a friend the other day. It’s not service-based, and it’s only two player, but you know what? Nobody’s added anything new to Halo in 16 years. Nobody’s changed anything. No one ever stepped in and went “you know what? The pistol is too powerful, we’re nerfing it.” If I want to play that stupid, overpowered, godlike, wonderful, amazing pistol, I can do it any day of the week. It’s fun as hell.

I get why the changes to Ember happened, but it’s a harder game for me to play now. It’s a game I feel less useful in. I’ve never found another frame I really clicked with. Ember was perfect for me. She was a frame that worked. Warframe isn’t a game I can block the pain out with; it’s 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 don’t like her. I don’t like her design, I don’t like her ability, and I hate listening to her drone’s music. She’s one of the only frames I didn’t bother to track down because she just isn’t 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 I’m done spending money on Warframe. I’m less likely to come back for more. I loved supporting Digital Extremes in the past, but I mean, what’s the point of playing a game when the designers make it harder to enjoy?

I know I’m just one guy, but it was nice playing a game that felt like there was something for everybody. Now there’s something for everybody but me.

[stompsite]

I Finally Played Resident Evil 4, You Monsters

Everyone has their pile of shame, those games that everyone expects you to have played but, for whatever reason, you haven’t. Other than computer game demos from Maximum PC or the occasional game at a friend’s house, I didn’t 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 article’s about one’s past aren’t 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, it’s 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 game’s controls were what made it scary, then the game itself wasn’t that scary at all. Resident Evil games were frequently brought up in this discussion, and because they weren’t available at all on the only gaming platform I had the ability to play for years, I had no reason to try them.

It wasn’t that I intentionally tried to avoid them--I’m of the belief that you can learn something from every game, so I’ll 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 didn’t do it for me; I didn’t connect with the game at all.

It turns out that I’m 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 didn’t 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.

That’s it.

In film, there’s this idea that editing should be invisible. Walter Murch, one of the world’s greatest film editors, argued that if you were paying attention to the edits, they weren’t 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 don’t think about it; we just do it. Fine motor skills are a part of basic human biology; think ‘grab,’ and you grab. You don’t 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, that’s exactly the point.)

The human brain is great at filtering out unnecessary information, and it gets better as it ages. We don’t 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; it’s 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 didn’t want to write an essay about Resident Evil 4 and the controls, because I’ve 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 Domain’s are the best, and I prefer some of Resident Evil 5’s boss fights in co-op to Resident Evil 4’s.

I keep coming back to RE4’s controls. Some friends have argued that Resident Evil 4 was designed to be played with its awkward control scheme, that it’s 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 isn’t 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, I’m just gonna say it: these people are wrong. They are wrong in the strictest, most absolute sense of the word. They’re making excuses because they love the game and don’t want to admit that it could be even better than it is. But it could be. Oh boy, it could be. And I’m 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 ‘new’ in some way, usually in regards to control schemes.

I don’t think this makes for better games.

Nintendo’s whole deal is like, hey, they won’t make something unless they can do it in a new way; I think people who won’t do something unless they can do it Extremely Well make more interesting process. Nintendo is more about innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have a new F-Zero; developers at Nintendo have said that they won’t 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 don’t think this is why their games work. Take Super Mario Galaxy, for instance. There is nothing about that game that couldn’t 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 they’re the best at making; it’s not great because of the Wii’s controller.

Innovation for innovation’s sake is how you get pickle and telephone-flavored ice cream; it’s not great. It’s also how you wind up with things like the N64 controller, which also isn’t great.

“Okay, Doc, so what’s wrong with quirky controllers? Haven’t you seen the cool unique control games that show up at GDC every year?”

Well, the big thing is that quirky controllers tie games to hardware, and the problem with hardware is that it’s 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 doesn’t exist anymore. It’s much harder to preserve those games.

At some point in the future, it’s 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 aren’t an ideal way to play DS games. Eventually, it’s 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 isn’t 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 they’re 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 PC’s ‘left stick to move, right stick to aim’ 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, don’t hold up. That’s 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 isn’t great and the buttons are mushy as heck… which brings me to Resident Evil 4. Look, RE4’s 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 ‘standard’ HD consoles in 2011. Resident Evil 4 is designed for the GameCube controller, or, put another way, it’s designed to take into account the limitations of the controller’s 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. It’s one of those “this is so simple I’m surprised no one figured it out sooner” things, but I’m a PC gamer, and we’ve been doing this in games since…

A Mac game.

...wanna guess who developed the Mac game?

“Was it Bungie, the guys who developed the modern control scheme for shooters that makes Halo 1 feel so wonderfully ageless, even to this day?”

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 wasn’t 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 “strafing” to mean “sidestepping while aiming,” but in a first person game, you’re always aiming, so I don’t think that’s 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 it’s great, because it lets you focus on playing the game instead of managing the camera. This control scheme isn’t 1:1 human-perfect simulation, but it’s doing its best to feel like human movement even when it isn’t. We can turn much more quickly than a controller stick can turn our cameras, for instance.

But then there’s Resident Evil 4.

In Resident Evil 4, when you push the stick to the left, Leon doesn’t 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 won’t 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 doesn’t know you’re there, so he hasn’t 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 didn’t, you’re going to have to keep turning to the left, walking forward, and turning back to hit the guy. It’s 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 you’re constantly needing to orient and reorient yourself for simple, small movements, you’re destroying readability, which means the game is suffering as a result. Clarity is always better. I’m sure someone will tell me about some little indie game that glitches words all over the screen in an unreadable mess or whatever, and that’s great if you’re trying to, say, show that a character has dyslexia or something, but you don’t want your entire game to be like that.

It’s interesting to me that a lot of RE4’s fans have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome, arguing that Re4 makes positioning important because it prevents you from moving while aiming, but it’s abundantly clear that this isn’t 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 don’t want to look when you’re 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 didn’t. The decision to stop the player in order to keep the game’s readability cascades from the decision to put the camera on the stick, and I think the camera’s 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 I’ve tried. I’ve tried a lot of controllers and I’ve never used a worse stick than that one, which is why I don’t think many people use it in GameCube games)

If Resident Evil 4 had been developed first for, say, the Xbox One, where I’ve been playing Resident Evil 4 lately, I think that not only would the game play a lot better, but Capcom wouldn’t have locked players in place to aim.

It’s worth noting that Mikami didn’t stick with RE4’s controls; on The Evil Within, his next horror game, he used that traditional left-to-move, right-to-aim control scheme we’re all familiar with. If Resident Evil 4’s 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 game’s 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 don’t think it will, but I’m 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 doesn’t help that there’s a bug in the game where your camera can jerk really far to the left or right when you aim; this wouldn’t happen on a typical control scheme, because the bug is tied to the game’s current camera setup; in a different camera setup, it wouldn’t 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 4’s 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 Remake’s controls look like they’ll 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, it’s 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: you’re 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 can’t see what’s out there watching us. If we know we’re being hunted but we don’t know where we’re being hunted from, we’re gonna start to get scared.

Once you’ve done that, give players a way to fight back; if all they can do is run, then they’ll 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 you’re going to find the bullets you need, or that your attack won’t bring more enemies, or that you won’t miss your enemy, you won’t 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 4’s relative unreadability doesn’t make it a better game. Its greatness comes from that wonderful encounter variety. It comes from seeing a thing and going “ah, okay, I need another thing to pull this off.” 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 Ashley’s 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. There’s 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 Wii’s unique motion controls. Some players consider this the definitive version of the game. As someone with chronic pain, motion controls really don’t work for me. But I do find myself wondering what would happen if Capcom reworked Resident Evil 4’s controls to be more like what RE2make’s appear to be. I suspect people would be surprised at how well it works.

Resident Evil 4’s brilliant level and encounter design makes it scary. Hearing the regenerators is scary. Running low on shotgun ammo or being flanked by guys you didn’t 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 there’s something unique that Resident Evil 4 does with its level structure that I haven’t 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.

[stompsite]

An Open Letter To Bungie

Hi, Bungie folks, I’m Doc. You recently released the Warmind DLC. I recently played it. I’m writing this blog post now for two reasons: one, I’m obligated to write content for my readers, and two, because in another, healthier life, people paid me to help them make their games better. I’m 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, I’m not some famous streamer or YouTuber who drives people to your games, and I’m not some universally beloved game designer like Shigeru Miyamoto. I’ve worked on games nobody will ever know about. I’ve worked on games everyone loves, and in the process, I’ve played and studied service based games more than just about anyone else out there. I want to help, because Bungie’s games have been good to me, and because I think they still can be.

I’m not gonna talk about Destiny 2 or how I felt about it or whether it’s good or bad or whatever. I’ve done that already. For the sake of my blog-reader-types, I’ve written about Destiny 2 for USGamer (part 1 and part 2), but I’m gonna assume you didn’t, and I’m 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 wasn’t as beloved as it could be. Bungie has, admirably, worked their asses off to make Destiny 2 a better game, and I think they’ve done a really good job, but I think there’s 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.

There’s two kinds of feedback I can provide. There’s 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: “Look, 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 on” or “you guys should really patch the physics glitch back into Crota’s End because that man cannon launch will never not be fun”)

Fixing my wants makes Destiny a better experience for me, but it doesn’t 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 I’m 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 it’s unsolicited feedback, I don’t have any kind of report parameters, briefings, “what we’re aware ofs,” or stuff like that. So I’ll 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, they’re great people. I love ‘em to pieces. But fans are usually, uh, not informed about game development, which means they’ll 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 I’ve ever interacted with in any way, shape, or even tweet.

Like, “we want a better grind,” for instance. That sounds really simple, right? What does “better” mean, though? I’ve heard some people say that getting rewards is too easy. I’ve heard other people say that getting meaningful rewards seems impossible. There’s 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 didn’t like the grind before and they don’t like the grind now. Okay, cool, but what do they like? Or, better yet, how can we move the grind to a place where they’re 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, that’s a really good first step, but there are still three fundamental problems with the grind.

Problem #1: The soft cap. It’s weird to do a 350 difficulty event and only get 342 gear for it. What’s 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? What’s the fun in doing it? I’m not gated by How I Play, I’m gated by the Weekly Reset. It’s weird to be told “stop playing now, you can’t make any forward progress.”

Some of the most fun I ever had was in Archon’s Forge in Destiny. I’d constantly jump into that with friends. Sure, it sucked that it wasn’t a matchmade activity, so we just kind of had to hope that we’d 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. I’ve 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 I’ve… 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 don’t 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 2’s case, that’s 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.

We’ve 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, I’m going to shard all of them in disappointment. It’s why “two tokens and a blue” became such a meme. It’s why two of my friends ragequit Destiny 2 the other day. They’re tired of getting blues.

So, what’s the solution? Fewer blues? More purples and exotics? Nah, it’s deeper than that.

When I get loot now, I do one of two things. If it’s blue, I shard it. If it’s purple, I check the light level, and if it won’t raise my light, I shard it. If it does, I infuse it. I don’t keep anything anymore. I’ve 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. I’ve 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 wasn’t 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, you’ll never care about another Hand Cannon with Outlaw. You’ve customized the one you found, it’s 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 there’s 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, there’s 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 don’t 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 didn’t 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 Orbit’s Scout Rifle or Shotgun or whatever, the other 50 didn’t matter to me, y’know? 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 aren’t 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. “Don’t fix what ain’t broke” could not be stated more here. In this case, unbreak what was working fine, please? It’ll 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 Oryx’s easy rune and get rewards, but only the best teams could beat the hardest runes.

Problem #3: Get some. Get none.

I’ve got this quest. It’s 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.

There’s a problem with your game if people are running away from your content. In the case of Escalation Protocol, it’s because nobody I’ve encountered can reliably get to the first loot drop. With Archon’s 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 “I’m too pissed off at this binary bullshit.”

That’s harsh. I don’t 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, what’s the point? And, like I said above, getting more blues don’t 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 “makes me more powerful or changes how I play” criteria.

“You either get something or you don’t, and because of this soft cap, it’s never good,” 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) That’ll 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… you’re always getting something, and that something leads to something new, and that something new changes your power or your level.

In Warframe’s case, every single weapon can be raised to level 30. Max out enough weapons, and you’ll improve your mastery rank. This rank offers a bunch of perks, which I’m not gonna get into here. “Forma” your level 30 weapon, and it starts over at level 1, but now it has more mod slots. The point isn’t “hey, do it like Warframe,” it’s “hey, 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-Forma’d gun might only have room for 4 perks. Forma it enough, and you’ll 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 aren’t getting what you want grinding one monster, it’s easy to grind another monster. There’s always something to do.

With Destiny 2, you either get something or you don’t, and, like my friend said, it’s 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 don’t 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. That’ll put you back up there with Destiny. To take things even further, I’d put the masterwork core chase on every gun. I’d have some sort of “item collection kiosk” 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. It’d be more fun to finish a strike on Venus and get Spirit Bloom and go “oh, heck, I need that, because this gun with these perks I like needs Spirit Bloom to upgrade.”

I mean… this sounds bad, but like… don’t fix what ain’t 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 doesn’t 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.

“But, Doc, why not be more imaginative than this?” Because I’m operating on a couple hours of sleep, am not allowed to drink any caffeine until after my surgery, and because no one’s paying me to do this. I’m just up blogging and trying to point more in a general direction than offer any serious, concrete solutions.

Besides, I don’t have any insights into how the engine works or what resources the team has or what deadlines they’re operating on. I don’t know what’s 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 I’ve messed in over the years. So I could hazard a guess, but I mean, I’d rather go “you had it figured out already” and “here’s what other people do” than sit down and come up with brand spankin’ new innovative ideas for a developer that might not even read this post, y’know?

But uh…

Well, this brings me to the surprise problem!

I’m 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, it’s 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, y’know? 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 they’re more focused on Doing Something New Every Time. That’s 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, Archon’s Forge, and Escalation Protocol instead. I’m 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 didn’t happen as often as it should have. Archon’s 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 Archon’s Forge different?

Now we have Escalation Protocol, and there are no keys, but there’s still the matchmaking problem, with an added “now you don’t get loot for beating a boss” issue. All three Destiny 1 events gave loot more reliably. Getting axes for skilled play seemed more predictable in Archon’s Forge than the Valkyries do in Escalation Protocol.

It feels like Bungie wants to make something new every time.

We’ve heard people from the Streamer/Youtuber Summit thing who’ve indicated that they’re not that excited by Bungie’s proposed weapon randomization system. So many of the changes in Destiny 2 seem completely arbitrary. It… how do I put this… don’t replace what ain’t broke, folks. We don’t need change for change’s sake. Improvements are better. Like, hey, I hated Exhumed. That’s a bad perk. I would have been way happier to see a bunch of new perks than to not have perks at all. I’d really like to see Prison of Elders or Archon’s 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 it’s The Big Endgame Activity of the DLC, I feel like it casts a pall over Warmind.

So that’s my last suggestion: improve what you’ve 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. There’s 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 don’t know if I’ll be picking up the next Destiny 2 installment. The patches are encouraging, but “the shooting feels better” isn’t why I come back to a game, y’know? It’s 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.

[stompsite]

What Else Can We Do?

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 game’s 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, it’s 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, there’s this idea called “continuity of motion,” 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 don’t 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 doesn’t 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, I’ve developed my aesthetic sensibilities into a complex, gut-driven “this is how I like ‘em to feel” thing that dictates how I think about game design.

But I’m not sure game designers think the same way.

In the 6th console generation--that’s 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. It’s 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 didn’t 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, I’m of the conviction that a game’s 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. It’s 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, it’s really cool that, as game design has progressed, we’ve gotten better at making games that anyone can pick up and play without requiring heavy instruction manuals to figure out. There’s still a ways to go, but we’re 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 there’s a problem: verbs.

In game design speak, a verb is “the thing you can do.” In a first person shooter, my verbs include things like “walk,” “reload,” and “shoot.” We’re 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 it’s easy to get what the game’s 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 you’ve seen them? Why is that so much more complicated than a gun? I mean, there’s the obvious part: pull a trigger, bullet comes out. A lot of our human interactions are super nuanced, often to the point where they’re reflecting how we feel.

A friend of mine, a wonderfully talented game designer, once pointed out to me that it’s really hard for a game to understand intent. It’s very good at understanding action, but intent is a whole other ball game.

When I shoot something with a gun, the game goes “ah, well, projectile comes out, projectile hits entity, entity is deleted.” 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 doesn’t 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 didn’t 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 “an awful lot of people were killed by you in the game. Therefore, you get The Bad Ending that reflects that You Are A Murderer.”

How I viewed the world and how the world viewed me were two different things, and there’s no really good way for the game to understand that. It’s 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.

There’s also the issue of fidelity. Remember, we’re 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 doesn’t mean you should use all of them. There’s 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. It’s 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, “Press F to Pay Respects” 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. It’s ludicrous, unless you’re willing to play along.

Finally, there’s the idea of systems. This one’s really complex and I’m super sick right now so I’m not really going to get into it in depth, but basically: if it happens in a game, it’s probably best if it can happen multiple times, for a lot of reasons. You’ve only got 16 buttons on a controller, after all. A dedicated “pay respects” 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 you’re 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 can’t be done in gameplay. One game I’ve been playing lately has still illustrations accompanied by narration because the game’s design and camera isn’t well suited to some of the ideas the story wants to convey.

So, basically: games don’t know what we’re doing unless the developers tell it in advance, and it’s impossible for most developers to anticipate every human’s intentions when playing the game. Even then, it’s a huge waste of resources to try to anticipate every single character interaction, and you’ve only got 16 buttons or so to use, so how would you even implement the mechanics if you had them?

Then you’ve got the additional problem of human behaviors that aren’t interesting. Most of us don’t think about breathing; you probably don’t want to make that manual. Males often deepen their voice unknowingly around other males; do we need a game mechanic for that? I’m 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 ‘fun’ verbs and tropes. It’s fun to press a button and make something explode. It’s 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 don’t understand video games at all begin tweeting up a storm about how it’s a shame there are so many violent games and why aren’t there other things? These people generally ignore all the nonviolent games that exist, from Spintires to Frostpunk; it’s 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. That’s why it got the name: you walk around, occasionally solve some light puzzles, and… well, that’s about it. You’ll generally listen to the story as it’s exposited to you through disembodied voiceover while you explore an empty, sterile space.

I’d like to bluntly suggest that the people who champion walking sims don’t 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 Fullbright’s Tacoma sales were nothing less than disastrous--is, I think, evidence that people don’t really want these experiences.

That doesn’t mean they don’t 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 game’s themes the way first-year university students are required to discuss The Lottery’s themes; this obsession with subject is a tremendous display of critical immaturity--the best critics understand that good criticism isn’t just what a thing is about, but how that thing goes about it)

So we’re 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, I’ve been wondering about that for a long time, because… how do I put this… while I am content to play exciting, violent games, I can’t help but feel that maybe we’ve settled into a groove of doing what’s familiar and shirked our responsibility to try new things. Sure, I think it’s stupid that someone would argue that “a game where you walk around really slowly and listen to a narrator” is anywhere near as compelling as a game where you murder the crap out of space aliens, but you can’t just logic feelings away, right? You can’t just go “well, you’re wrong, get out of games if you don’t like shooting space aliens.” The proposed ‘solution’ to violent games is idiotic, but the feelings at the root of it all aren’t 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 weren’t 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 “you don’t have to do the thing I don’t want you to do,” 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 wasn’t 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 we’d make more, and she’d 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 “-opia” sounds. It’s too happy.

Some of the ideas made it through. Others didn’t. We weren’t 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 game’s script, you can figure most things out.

Some stuff didn’t turn out the way I would’ve 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 wasn’t 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. I’m still somewhat torn on that, but I don’t think it’s 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 didn’t fit, like being torn apart by coyotes or speaking to a gigantic, ancient gunslinger who sat down in a field and wouldn’t stop growing. They didn’t make it in, and understandably so. Chris brought so much to the project, he’s 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 it’s a project that’s rich with verbs. Some people have called it a walking sim, but not many. We’re nowhere near as successful as most walking sims with plenty of pedigree, marketing, and a Steam release, but that’s okay. This is a game about doing things--things you wouldn’t normally do in a video game. At least when it comes to my contribution, Paratopic is a game about what else we can do.

[stompsite]

Can Violence Be Okay?

As some of you know, I’m basically gonna die real soon unless I can get heart surgery, but that’s expensive. I make money by writing essays about games. If you like my work, please share it around, because personally, I’d like to keep on living. If you wanna support me, I’ve got patreon, ko-fi, and a critically acclaimed game out. I’m also looking for work as a designer or writer, so if you know of anything, let me know, please? I’ve worked on well over a dozen AAA and indie games doing everything from emergency script rewrites to helping devs improve their investment loops. I’ve put a lot of time into the 29 years of my life so far, and I’d 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! 

Dishonored 2 is one of my favorite games. I’ve written about it at length before. I’ve 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 didn’t 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 I’d 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 didn’t ghost every level, but I certainly approached things non-lethally where I could.

Turns out that the game doesn’t like it when you kill monsters.

I mean, sure, if you kill, like, a rat, the game doesn’t 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 weren’t actually people. So when I made the choice to kill them, the game saw it as Corvo choosing the path of violence… but that’s not the decision I made.

Let’s rewind a bit.

One of my favorite story archetypes is about people without power who, through cleverness, ingenuity, and grit, overcome those with power. It’s not just about being an underdog, it’s about being underestimated, devalued, even downright abused. It’s about the defiance that comes with that, and overcoming the expectations someone has.

I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve 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 “wow, it’s remarkable that you’re so intelligent for someone so poor” 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 didn’t want to give it to him. I have watched people with power hurt and abuse those without. Heck, I’ve been at the mercy of people more powerful than me before. I don’t like that. When I can tell someone’s 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… that’s awesome as heck.

It was kinda weird when Dishonored 2 shows up and indicates that maybe Dunwall didn’t 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. There’s the personal story of “someone hurt your family and took your home and you should take it back,” and then there’s the idea of “you’re fighting for justice for people who are downtrodden by the people who took your home.”

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 haven’t played because I wanted to hear Stephen Russell’s voice again). Like, there’s this implication that he and Emily haven’t really fixed anything at all and maybe kinda betrayed Jessamine’s legacy with that? I dunno. It’s really the only criticism I have of Dishonored 2 anymore, and I mean, the game’s still a 10/10 for me. It’s one of the only games that can grab hold of my attention and actually distract me from the pain I’m 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 she’s 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. It’s like saying a drink is smooth, right? Like, it just feels right. I’ve never played an Arkane game that felt bad (maybe Arx Fatalis does, but I’ve 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 can’t just do what feels good; you’re taking a test.

When the witches came along, I’m not gonna lie, it felt good to let loose. They’re just as powerful as I am, so it’s not like it’s an uneven playing field.

But… that wasn’t my first reaction. I’d encountered the witches before in The Knife of Dunwall and The Witches of Brigmore, and they’re 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, he’d 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 couldn’t get the nonlethal option to work.

But I wasn’t that concerned, because I felt the witches needed to be killed.

Why?

Because they’re horrible, and I think they seem closer to Vampires--supernatural monsters--than people. 

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 sister’s hair so she can gain trust and then stab her sister in the throat. The witches are hostile too--it’s not possible to approach them peacefully. They react to you like you’ve just invaded their vampiric crypt.

The mechanics don’t really leave room for interacting with them sympathetically; there’s 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.

I’m okay with knocking someone out when the heart says something like “He wasn't always like this. One of his works still hangs in a museum,” or “If he looks sad, it is because he mourns the child he lost,” but I had to look up a list of the heart’s lines about the witches because I couldn’t 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 they’re even happy to kill each other too. Read some of the notes--it’s indicated that they’re sadists. They take delight in killing anyone and everyone. The environmental storytelling seems to indicate the same thing; nothing good comes of a witch’s 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 I’d like her too. But I saw what she did. I saw what she’d chosen to become.

Many of the witches are contextualized in this way. I think the actual target of the museum mission--sorry, I’ve 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 didn’t 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 vampire’s thrall than anything else, and the game never does anything with that. No “please, I don’t want to do this,” or anything.

They became witches, and are now visiting a far greater violence upon the Empire. As one of my friends pointed out--and I’m inclined to agree--the Empire kind of deserves it, at least in Dishonored 2. It’s not a good society. I mean, it’s weirdly forward thinking in some ways, right? Like literally all of the romantic fiction I’ve encountered in the universe is LGBT stuff. But then in other ways it’s 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 it’s 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 doesn’t tell us about that. It isn’t saying “her husband used to beat her, so she relishes the power she has” or anything. None of these lines speak to a culture of misogynistic violence. Instead, we have a woman who “spent a month killing those who had slighted her.”

Slighted.

Not abused, beat, hurt. Slighted.

There is, as far as I’ve seen, precisely one person who was a victim: “Beaten 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.”

I’ve been abused. It’s 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 don’t really want to talk about. I’ve 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. I’ve met people who are very angry, and I’ve heard people say “ah, well, it’s okay for them to lash out, because they were abused, so it’s only natural.” Heck, I’ve been one of the people who lashed out. It was only an emotional outburst, but it remains one of the worst things I’ve 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 don’t talk about. I’ve sat with friends who’ve 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 game’s final level makes it abundantly clear that their behaviors are monstrous.

So. Uh.

Look at Gary Oldman’s Dracula.

Dracula’s 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. It’s unfair what happened to him. But I mean, he still murders people and stuff. Dude’s gotta get stabbed in the heart. Sure, it’s 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 don’t. In the Brigmore witches, it sure as heck appears to be that they’re preying on the poor. It’s not like they’re out there fighting a revolutionary war against the nobility, and that their magical powers tip the scale. No, they’re killing everyone, even like… public works dudes. It’s an indiscriminate process. They’re killing people they don’t even know.

What makes them not monsters? They have power, and they use that power with cruelty. Dishonored’s 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 he’s 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 didn’t Corvo shut that down?).

So I was thinking about all of this when I killed the witches. They weren’t 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, weren’t out for justice. They weren’t 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 girl’s doing, it might seem fine, but to be so casual as she walks past a pile of bodies… that’s 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 Outsider’s gifts and play without any powers at all. They outclass everyone else, and they kill for the thrill. Someone has to stop them. It’s urgent.

A friend of mine got really upset with me for killing the witches. He said that these were women who’d been mistreated and society deserved to burn. But I mean… if you’re a random guy in a library, are you gonna be able to stop a squad of guards who throw innocent people in prison, kill people’s 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--they’re 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 they’re so reminiscent of horror characters who lose themselves through possession or vampirism that I don’t 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 didn’t even feel their tazers and they weren’t supposed to shoot him. This cop ended up in a knock-down, drag out brawl with a man who wasn’t feeling any pain. He ended up bashing a pyrex bowl over the guy’s head so hard it shattered before backup arrived. He told me “if I could have shot him, I think I would have.”

To me, this brings up the question: is it possible to be violent in a game for a constructive purpose? There’s that old quote, misattributed to Orwell, that says something like “we sleep soundly in our beds at night because there are men who visit violence upon those who would do us harm.”

I must admit, I’d love future Dishonored games that involved dismantling the monarchy and trying to find a better, fairer government. I’d love to visit Pandyssia and dismantle traditional colonialist tropes. I’d like to grapple with questions about the ethics of violence, because that’s 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 didn’t think he deserved it, because rich people think the only honest way to have money is to receive it from one’s 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 weren’t 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 “knock out” or “murder.” Should I knock out a monster that rejoices in slaughter? Or should I put it down so that it won’t 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 don’t 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 don’t like violence, but I think maybe there are times when it’s 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.

[stompsite]

On The Importance of Caring

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 he’d 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 ‘I don’t get this. Can we watch something else?’ I wanted to scream. He wasn’t paying attention to the movie! Of course he didn’t get it!

That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates an important point: if people don’t connect with your story, they’ll want to try something else. My friend created his own problem, but he’s far from the only person to struggle with following a movie. Heck, I’m 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 what’s going on in some stories.

What’s the point of watching a movie we aren’t connected to? David Mamet, one of the best living playwrights, once said “ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.” He wrote it just like that, in all caps, in a letter to the writers of a television show he was working on.

It’s important to note that your audience doesn’t need to understand your story, and that’s why I haven’t used the word until now. It’s important that they connect to it emotionally. I loved watching Twin Peaks: The Return last summer, but I definitely didn’t understand that final episode. Emotionally, I connected with it, and it left a lasting impression on me, but I can’t 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 “see spot run,” or religious instruction, like Jesus’ 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, you’re 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 aren’t. 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.

It’s not a science, though. Emotions aren’t like programs; you can’t input the same information to every human and expect the same output. You can ballpark it, but we’re all going to react in different ways. I can’t really tell you how I feel when watching Alien other than “it always grabs my attention,” 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 can’t 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 aren’t 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 I’ve forgotten facing off against Zilla. That movie was so bad, by the way, that Toho doesn’t even consider Zilla to be a ‘real’ Godzilla.

So it’s 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 weren’t 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 what’s 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 can’t assume anyone knows what’s 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 you’re 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 I’m still not finished with it.

That’s a lot of words to make a simple point: all stories need to make sure the audience connects with ‘em on an emotional level, but games need to do it the most, because it’s harder to connect to games emotionally than anything else, because it’s so easy to distract audiences.

If you asked me what I thought of Assassin’s Creed Origins, I’d tell you that it’s one of the best games in the series. If you asked me about the writing, I’d tell you that it’s pretty good; several people in my Twitter feed have noted that Bayek, the game’s protagonist, speaks differently to adults than he does to children, but not in a way that feels condescending. He’s friendly, warm, and open. He’s 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 Assassin’s 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 I’m talking about the story of Origins, we’re gonna get into spoiler territory. Normally, I don’t care all that much about issuing spoiler warnings, because my assumption is that if you’re reading criticism of a game, you should expect spoilers, but it’s a recent enough game that I’ll be on the safe side and offer you one now.

The game begins with Bayek assassinating… some guy. We’re not really sure who this guy is or why, but Bayek doesn’t 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. We’re not really sure why they’re friends or what their relationship is, and when that guy dies later in the game, most of us probably didn’t care all that much, because the guy gives us like two early quests, and that’s 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; she’s not just someone we meet once and then forget about on our wacky adventures until she dies, she’s 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 Bayek’s friends the way he does, and that’s true. Have you ever heard of the rule “show, don’t tell”? That rule exists as a means of leveraging empathy to help people connect to a story. If someone says “Sarah is crying because her dog died,” you might feel nothing, because you don’t 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 you’re going to feel a lot more strongly about it.

So Bayek is angry and he’s talking about some guys with weird animal names and how he’s going to kill them. He talks about how he’s been gone for a while but now he’s 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, we’re processing this intellectually, not emotionally, so it doesn’t really resonate with us. Second, the writers appear to be doing their best to approach this realistically. What I mean is, Bayek isn’t like “ugh, I’ve lost my memory, please explain how everything works?” or “hmm, I’ve forgotten you, who are you? Please tell me who you are.” Some games approach this with more subtlety; I love Half-Life because nobody knows what’s going on, not just you. There’s 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 Bayek’s 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 he’s mad at all these animal dudes that he’s been killing. Then we’re back in the present, doing more quests. At one point, you stumble across Bayek’s house. I did not realize, for the longest time, that this was Bayek’s house. It was just A House. Then Bayek said something and I was like “ooooh… okay.” But I didn’t 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. We’ve 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; I’ve never met Aya. She’s a stranger. I feel like a third wheel, disconnected from the experience.

Now, I’m 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 didn’t realize it was him at first. It was just some dude. Then it turns out the villain is actually his… sidekick? There’s this guy we meet in like… one scene in the game? Julius, or Jules, if you’re buds, is like “hey, that guy you want to kill who you thought killed your son? He’s not the dude. Also I don’t want you to kill him, I’m going to arrest him.” The real guy is his bodyguard dude who’s standing next to him. At one point he says something like “yes, Caesar, I will ready the guards” or something, but when it’s revealed that he’s the villain, it’s… 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 “hey, he’s the bad guy! Mwahahaha!”

I think the game writers believe this is clever. “Wow, that guy in the background was an evil villain the whole time!” But this only works if you actually know the character and don’t 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 “haha, oh, this guy again.” 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 doesn’t do it well at all.

What’s weird is, so many times, you’re playing the game and it just seems to assume that you know who you’re talking to. When people were saying the guy’s name--and I didn’t encounter it enough times to remember it, despite playing almost nothing but Assassin’s Creed Origins from beginning to end in the span of two weeks--I wasn’t matching the name to the face. I didn’t know who the guy was.

Imagine someone going “wow, Bob? I can’t believe Bob was the villain the whole time!” and I’m 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.

It’s hard to care when you can’t put a name to a face. It’s hard to care when you feel like you don’t know what’s going on. It’s hard to care when you aren’t 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 I’m not going to feel satisfied when I kill the men who murdered his son. Instead, I’m going to feel like I just checked off another item on the list.

DOOM is so satisfying because you feel what Doomguy feels. You’re 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 can’t help but feel that some of the game’s 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.

There’s a villain we kill named the Crocodile. We meet a little girl, and later, she gets killed. We find out who did it--the Crocodile’s henchmen. We hunt down those henchmen. We meet an “old friend” (who Bayek knows but we don’t), 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 Crocodile’s house and killed her before it even dawned on me that the person she was speaking with was Bayek’s 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; we’d 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 ‘old friend’ simply despawned, and I never saw her again. I think the game wanted me to care that she’d switched sides. I barely knew her and she disappeared when I stabbed the Crocodile with my hidden blade.

Speaking of the hidden blade, it’s weird to me that the game never really goes into its creation; it’s the most iconic thing in the entire series, and it just… kinda happens? Bayek accidentally slices his finger off at one point, the end. Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s 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 you’ll miss it.

Normally, when I criticize a game, I try to talk about why something works or doesn’t, but I try not to say “it might be better if they did this or that.” The reason for this is because I don’t know what it was like for the developers to make the game, and hey, the game’s out now, so it’s not like they can change things. Recommendations are for when I’m consulting on a game, not after the fact.

Here, I’ve talked about what Assassin’s Creed Origins could have done to make things better, and that reason is this: because another game already did it.

Assassin’s 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 you’re meeting an important historical character, as opposed to Julius Caesar’s introduction in Origins.

There’s a confidence in Assassin’s 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 game’s 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 don’t know the murderer’s name, but you know his face, because you’ve seen him repeatedly throughout the game. Uncovering his identity--Rodrigo Borgia, is a big part of Assassin’s Creed II’s adventure. Every step of the way, Assassin’s Creed II primes you emotionally for what’s to come. When bad things happen to people you’re allied with, you care, because you’ve built relationships with these people. When you take down the Borgias, it’s so satisfying because you knew them.

A random guy who was Caesar’s sidekick is way less satisfying to kill.

Origins plays better, in some ways, than Assassin’s 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--it’s 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 I’m diabetic and I have a heart condition that requires surgery. It took a lot out of me. Really sorry this one’s being posted in April instead of March. I’m hoping to publish a lot more this month, though!

[stompsite]

Death of Walking Sims

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 hasn’t stopped hurting in weeks, and the other day, it started beating so fast I almost fainted and had to sit down. Not sure what’s up with that, but nothing good. I’ll have more stuff for ya’ll 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 Room’s debut, Dear Esther. While it wasn’t 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.

It’s an apt descriptor: in a walking sim, the player’s 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 genre’s 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 sim’s detractors claim that walking sims lack any kind of meaningful interaction, rendering them worthless.

The biggest argument against walking sims goes like this: "they aren’t games." Gamers have a problem with elitism; people who slog and swear through a game on a higher difficulty level see themselves as ‘true gamers,’ 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. There’s a sense that a game that doesn’t 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.

You’ll 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 don’t 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 doesn’t provide me with that same thrill.

This desire for hardcore experiences isn’t inherently wrong; I’ve 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 “walking sim” originates in March 2012, mere weeks after Dear Esther’s remarkable debut.

When it comes to walking sims, the hardcore players are technically correct, but actually wrong. A “game,” is, more or less, a form of structured play, and while that’s a remarkably broad definition, it doesn’t necessarily cover walking sims. In the same way that “real time strategy” isn’t the best name for the RTS genre, “video games” isn’t 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, 1979’s FS1 Flight Simulator could never be classed as a game. There are plenty of things that most people would consider to be a “video game” even if they’re not truly games, and walking sims are no exception.

But even if walking sims weren’t 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 ‘real game’ or not doesn’t stop it from existing and can’t 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 stage—it’s a bit difficult to make an exciting Farming Simulator trailer—but pretending these games don’t 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 “More “average” people feel now that they should own [a computer].” Supposedly, the masses enjoyed violent games with immediate gratification, while more educated, upper class fans preferred nonviolent adventure games, because they were better people.

It’s strange that people argue that walking sims are pioneering new territory; there’s nothing walking sims like Dear Esther or Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs do that hasn’t 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 Esther’s 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 film’s most important early directors, D.W. Griffith, supposedly claimed “all you need for a good story is a girl and a gun.” Violent films like Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men have won plenty of awards. Violence is a facet of the human experience; while it’s great to have art without violence, it’s 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 doesn’t make something inherently important or valuable.

The walking sim’s 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 “makes it more susceptible to backlash.”

None of these claims are satisfactory. After all, it’s self-evident that gamers love non-violent games; why else would games like American Truck Simulator or FIFA be popular? Gamers don’t 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 there’s 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 isn’t worthwhile, and some other thing, which you don’t enjoy, is supposed to be a great deal more important. Wouldn’t that bother you? It feels like much of the criticism I’ve 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 doesn’t explain why walking sims, for a few years, were critically acclaimed, financially successful games that dealt with topics most games didn’t, but the genre seemed to die off quickly. Within five years of Dear Esther’s 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 One’s 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 genre’s simplicity is the problem. It’s a fundamentally reductive genre; all you do is walk, usually listening to someone else’s story take place. While that is a mechanic in and of itself, it rarely becomes anything more. A walking sim’s 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. You’re just there to press W and trigger the occasional audio clip. At best, you’ll have to consider the environment, contrasting what you’re hearing with what you’re seeing, like an art installation. Compare that with a shooter, which is much more engaging, not just because there’s 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 guide’s 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 they’re 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 you’ve 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 they’re video games at all? Is a game’s 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 storytelling’s oldest and best rules is this: show, don’t 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 doesn’t receive the kind of “not a game” insults that Gone Home does, because it shows the relationship. Gone Home merely talks about one.

The genre’s 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 “real games,” and feeling threatened by their advocates.

The walking sim isn’t doing so well because there’s 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. It’s 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 Chung’s 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 it’s bursting at the seams with rich and inventive sequences. One moment, you’re a child in a bath, then you’re a tentacled creature in a forest, and soon you’re 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 you’re really in the character’s shoes, living out their stories. They have no room for passive observers; they’re too busy letting you inhabit the characters you play.

Fundamentally, there’s nothing really wrong with walking sims. It’s 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. They’re not that popular because they’re fairly limited as a form, and once the initial newness wore off, there wasn’t that much to support them.

For the walking sim to thrive now, it’s going to have to move beyond “walk forward while audio plays at you.” 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, we’re going to see other genres borrowing elements of the walking sim, and if we’re lucky, standouts like Thirty Flights of Loving. The walking sim might be on life support, but if it can evolve, it doesn’t have to be.

changelog: i added a little section to clarify the whole ‘gamer elitism’ thing; it’s 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, I’m still alive, but dealing with the fallout of that

don’t know why I wrote ‘videogames’ when I meant “video games,” but whatever.

[stompsite]

The One About Dark Souls

This piece was originally slated for another publication about a year ago. It didn’t get published. So here it is.

This time, I’m confident I have him. Father Gascgoine has been plaguing me for weeks, but I’ve got it all worked out. I enter the arena, pumped up and ready to do this. For a few minutes, everything’s fine, but then I feel that telltale twinge in my hand. Before I know it, the pain’s burning up my arm and into my neck. I have to put the controller down. My poor health has betrayed me again. I’ll never be good enough to beat a Souls game.

Dark Souls is hard. That’s what it’s 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. FromSoftware’s 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 game’s 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 game’s world, conquering its challenging bosses. Whenever you defeat an enemy, you earn a currency, called ‘souls,’ or ‘blood echoes,’ 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 game’s 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. “Git gud,” the fanbase’s mantra, isn’t so much a statement of derision as a description of the player’s 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. “Just one more turn,” you tell yourself, and before you know it, it’s 5 in the morning and you’ve 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, you’re back at the nearest bonfire. “That was a cheap death,” you tell yourself, “I can totally get past it.”

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 designer’s jokey ambushes is enjoyable. Souls engages you, draws you in, and delivers some of the best emotional highs in gaming.

It’s 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. Ikaruga’s 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 can’t 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 game’s systems. I want to be a part of this passionate and vibrant community so much, but I can’t.

I can’t 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, I’d 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, I’d 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 didn’t work right. It was a lot more complicated than that, but that’s 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 doesn’t absorb it properly.

Chronic fatigue is a deeply misunderstood disease. People don’t 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 don’t believe it’s 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 I’m fortunate enough to be able to do from home, I don’t know how I would survive.

During her TED talk on chronic fatigue, documentarian Jennifer Brea pauses and simply states “my brain is not what it used to be.” I know what she means, because I’ve been there. I was so much more than this. Chronic fatigue consumes everything. I’m 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 don’t know how I’ll 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. I’d love to experience that too.

Most of you aren’t 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 Bloodborne’s 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 it’s not that simple. Disability isn’t something most of us talk about openly. Discussing it has a tendency to make people uncomfortable; some even resent having to deal with it. It’s hard to leave the house most days, knowing that most people don’t 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 I’ve never understood.

I’ve 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 doctor’s 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 “for your own good.”

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, I’ll 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. I’ve 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 it’s 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 don’t think there’s a way to avoid that without fundamentally changing the game’s 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. Destiny’s 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 haven’t been since. Controllers are awful for me; playing with them often results in hand cramps and muscle spasms. It’s much less painful to aim with a mouse, so I’ve 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 Kaplan’s 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 it’s frustrating to hear that he would even consider the first option.

How would an easy mode in Souls work? It’s simple: let players take a lot more damage before dying. It’s 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 can’t always pull off. I tense my muscles when I’m 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 developer’s part. Tweaking enemy animations to provide longer ‘tells’ prior to attacking would be a great step. Dark Souls’ 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, I’m sure this all sounds like heresy. The suggestions are moot, of course--From is done making Souls games, and it’s 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 can’t, 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 there’s no option to change difficulties. If you have the ability to help us, would you?

#dark souls

[stompsite]

Well, that was 2017

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 couldn’t 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. I’ve 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. I’m living a solitary life. No dogs to walk, no social commitments. Thanks to my untreated health issues, I’m 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 “people like you devote 90% of their attention to keeping pain at bay.” I use games for that. It’s a coping mechanism. I envy my friends who can work regularly. When I’m able to afford treatment, ideally if G1 gets funded, I’ll gladly join them.

It’s not all bad. I think it’s important to play and learn from games. If I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be able to write about them, and that’s the only thing keeping me alive, so I could regret that time, but I’m 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, “perfect.” The guy we pitched to was shocked that our multiplayer functionality wasn’t 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, I’ve played some games that aren’t really abandoned, games I’ll be coming back to when I can. I did everything in Breath of the Wild but a shrine or two, for instance. I haven’t finished Death of the Outsider--I’m basically done--because I don’t 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. I’ve spent years helping devs make better games. I’ve spent even longer explaining how good shooter mechanics work. I know we’ll 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.

[stompsite]

Sub-Machine Guns Are Literally The Worst And I Hate Them. Here Is Why.

“O, 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!” ~ some poet, 1529

Look, here’s the fuckin deal: I have posted thousands of rants on twitter dot com, and it never occurred to me that I could just, I don’t know, post them here? Maybe people would enjoy them more as easily linked back-to articles? So here goes.

There’s 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 shouldn’t. There’s also the BFG-9000 and the Plasma gun, but those are science fiction weapons, so not every shooter has ‘em 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 Halo’s Needler, Half-Life’s Crossbow, and Turok’s 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 ‘heavy’ weapon, but it’s 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. Doesn’t matter how good or how bad, this is just what people do when making first person shooters. It’s a good thing, too. Pistol is “single shot gun,” shotgun is “inaccurate thing that fires multiple shots,” and rocket launcher is “single, slow-moving projectile that does splash damage.”

Then there’s the automatic weapon. It was a chain gun/gatling gun type deal in Doom, but in other games, it’s 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 they’re tight enough to hit in the direction you’re pointing at and do damage, but inaccurate enough that someone will yawn “yes, it’s balanced,” and call it a day.

So far, so good. Not a great weapon type, but that’s 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. It’s the gun that you use when you’re not in the fight to have an interesting time, just to get through the fight. You aim it, you pull the trigger, things die. It’s the optimum gun--there’s a reason the US Military doesn’t equip everyone with a shotgun/rocket launcher loadout, after all.

So here’s Johnny Game Dev, who’s made a successful first person shooter, and everyone loved it, and everyone’s happy, but now he’s got to make a sequel, and damned if he won’t add some kind of new gun to it. The problem is, he’s exhausted all his options. He’s got the pistol. He’s got the rifle. He’s got the shotgun. He’s got the rocket launcher. Maybe he’s got the sniper rifle too. Heck, maybe he’s even tossed in a grenade launcher and a plasma rifle.

What’s 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 doesn’t fire rockets like the rocket launcher (there are rocket-propelled bullets, but they obviously aren’t going to work like a regular rocket launcher would), and your automatic rifle isn’t 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 it’s still fundamentally a shotgun in that it’s a burst weapon, something that does a lot of high damage at the expense of reduced magazine capacity. Your rocket launcher’s all about projectiles that do massive splash damage, but they move so slowly that enemies can’t dodge them, so you’ve got to be smart about where you place your rockets.

Every gun has utility. The assault rifle’s 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. It’s 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 don’t 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 that’s the right term?). A longer weapon with faster bullets is going to be more accurate than a shorter weapon with slower bullets.

This isn’t 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, it’s 2:28 AM), are working on making more accurate, heavy-hitting, but compact weapons. It’s 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, that’s a reasonable thing to do, but that lack of accuracy means they’re often nowhere near as effective as shotguns. They lack that sort of “dual role” of an AR, because you can’t meaningfully burst-fire them for increased accuracy. 

So it’s weird when a game makes an entire class of weapons around what’s basically, functionally, a less-satisfying (unless you’re 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 doesn’t 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. It’s 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 hasn’t changed--sidearms BEHAVE like pistols, and make players BEHAVE the same way, they just make players click more times to perform the same task.

That’s the problem with SMGs and sidearms and other “slight tweaks on a formula” weapons: they don’t 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). 

This lets us work out the basics of how the gun’s primary fire mode is gonna work. We can be as flexible with this as we’d like with the secondary fire. This is fundamentally about a gun’s visuals communicating how it works to the player immediately and sorting them in the inventory. If you get a shotgun, you’ll play it like you would a shotgun, even if, idfk, our secondary fire is a machine gun (tho I’m trying to keep most of ‘em more exotic than that).

That’s my thought process.

Basically, a lot of guns that are very close together so as to be indistinguishable... shouldn’t. 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 ‘em different archetypes. Clearly define their roles so there’s no pointless overlap with other weapon classes. Make ‘em worth using, instead of just being crappier auto rifles that are outclassed by those and assault rifles.

[stompsite]

Autopsy: Mass Effect Andromeda

Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them “good boy” and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyone’s a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and you’ve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.

Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where you’re 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 don’t 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. It’s why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. It’s why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel you’ve been waiting years for. It’s why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. It’s 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 weren’t able to make the game they wanted to make. There’s a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when you’re 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 don’t necessarily mean you’re happy with what you got; after all, there’s 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 game’s oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldn’t have to leave. I didn’t 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 it’s 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 doesn’t 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. It’s a miracle any game gets made. Even something like “opening a door” is incredibly complex. And there’s 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. We’re here to talk about why a game didn’t work. We’re not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and we’re not here to complain about the developers. It’s human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and it’s just as human to want to avoid the blame. I’m 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--that’s 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If you’re one of the two people I know who loved the game, I’m not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didn’t 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. I’m here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, I’m working on the assumption you haven’t played the game, but I won’t be avoiding spoilers either.

So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s look at the game.

1. Narrative

Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. There’s some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, it’s 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--that’s 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, it’s sci-fi, so we don’t 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 can’t travel between worlds without using these big ‘mass relays’ 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 can’t use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though that’s a technology that’s been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the series’ 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. I’m 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, there’s this idea called the ‘idiot ball.’ It comes from the writer’s room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the ‘idiot ball’ one week, making bad choices that lead to the story’s 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 wasn’t 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. Don’t get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but you’d think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I don’t 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 isn’t 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 wasn’t 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. It’s difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told they’re the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesn’t 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 Council’s ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isn’t 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 2’s “Oh yeah? You don’t believe in an alien menace? Well, I’m gonna prove it to you!” 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. There’s some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and it’s 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. He’s trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of “guards! Seize them!” I don’t 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 Saren’s base, interrogate Saren’s sidekick), but in Andromeda, uh…

Yeah. I just finished the game and I’ve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Don’t get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.

What’s the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says “hey, it’s me, your brother! I’m being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!” You wouldn’t believe him. It’s a case of someone telling you that they’re 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: everyone’s 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.

It’s a problem with the game’s 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, “The Malediction Prophecy.”

“It'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.”

People don’t 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 everyone’s got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very “I’ve only ever read YA fiction in my entire life”?

Andromeda’s like that. People talk weird. They say things like “excuse me, my face is tired,” 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 don’t 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 “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” 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 “what happened?” Your character, for some unknown reason, replies “to who?” Addison responds “it’s ‘to whom, and your goddamn father.”

I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guy’s Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say “your goddamn father” in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is “a dude we all care about just died.” It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go “uh, this makes no sense”? 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, it’s about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, it’s hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyone’s 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? I’m 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 Andromeda’s 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. EA’s doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EA’s 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 I’ve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. It’s 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 there’s 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. There’s nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Bioware’s 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 couldn’t begin to describe the other two alien species. One’s a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like I’ve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh… pretty normal. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

It’s all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities won’t surprise you. Seen the Giant’s Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.

Again, I don’t 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 Bioware’s other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. It’s weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesn’t 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 doesn’t explain the writing or the art design, though.

As some of you may know, I’m 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 (I’d 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!), we’ve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the game’s 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 I’ve 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, I’ve 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 don’t know why it’s bad. I don’t 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 I’m 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, I’d probably call it “a waste of time.”

I mean this literally. I’ve 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.

Here’s an example, and I’m 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 ‘fly’ 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 won’t 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 that’s nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the “go to slums” option.

You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. It’s 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 that’s a pain to drive around.

Every planet is this bad. You’d think they might let you spawn wherever you’d like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, that’s not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points aren’t in convenient spots, but there’s nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, you’re usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. You’re 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 there’s not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the game’s 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 it’s a straight upgrade every time, so there’s literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.

Chances are the Dhan X won’t be craftable, because there’s no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldn’t get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, it’s weird that they’d put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. That’s like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you can’t sort between any of them.

Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), you’re 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. Wouldn’t 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 can’t swap items out at will… it’s frustrating.

There’s this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isn’t a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I don’t want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. I’d 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 3’s weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.

It’s awful. And I don’t 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, you’ve 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 you’ll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but don’t 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. There’s a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and it’s not actually Meridian, but you don’t 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 “do two things, and then the third thing will be different.”

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 don’t 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 ‘perfect number’ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but you’re 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 they’re 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 there’s settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesn’t feel like you’re exploring, it feels like you’re a space janitor.

The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games don’t have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.

If players can predict what’s 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 can’t 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, it’s not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me “I need a thing,” giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldn’t help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasn’t there. That’s 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. You’ll 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 someone’s 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 wasn’t like I’d 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. Couldn’t 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 shouldn’t be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say “yeah, take the reward, it’s in that box over there,” 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. That’s part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.

I’m not gonna lie, I’d 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 you’re a professional writer, you’re probably going “why is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?” Well, I’m being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what it’s like to play Andromeda.

It’s a waste of time, and it’s broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I don’t know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I don’t know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I don’t 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 doesn’t earn anything. The art isn’t 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, you’re 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 there’s 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. There’s so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking it’s better than it is.

Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. That’s what gets players playing and talking. That’s why they spend money. If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother making video games.

#stompsite #gameautopsy

[stompsite]

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, we’re gonna do 30, so that it ends on an even 100. Then we’ll go back to doing 20.

And here.

We.

Go.

EVIL GENIUS is so good that it’s in my regular rotation of games now. It’s basically a city builder, except it’s a base builder. Just scale down Tropico and you’ve 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. It’s a brawler. It’s fun. You should play it. I can’t believe I slept on it so long. SLAAAAAY.

CAYNE is an isometric adventure game from the creators of Stasis. I played the entire thing. It’s free, but it’s good enough that I recommend buying the $6.99 DLC the developers released for it, to show ‘em 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 you’re a fan of Sanitarium, play this. If you’ve never heard of Sanitarium... play Sanitarium. INCREDIBLE.

THE CAT LADY is an adventure game, I guess? I didn’t really enjoy what I played, so I gave up. ADIOS.

THE CAVE wouldn’t 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 I’ll test it out there some other day.

CHAINSAW WARRIOR and CHAINSAW WARRIOR: LORDS OF THE NIGHT are tabletop games turned into video games. I wasn’t really into ‘em, so they’re 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. It’s got great ratings on steam, BUT I WASN’T LAUGHING.

CHOMPY CHOMP CHOMP is like Pac-Man kinda except there are four players and they’re all trying to eat the one they’re supposed to eat while avoiding the one they aren’t supposed to eat. GAME OVER.

CINDERS is a visual novel/RPG that retells the story of Cinderella. It’s got great ratings on Steam, so if this is your jam, play it. Sadly, it’s not mine. NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER HERE.

CITIES IN MOTION is by the guys who later made Cities: Skylines. It’s 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 you’re 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? Didn’t enjoy it much. GO BACK TO SLEEP.

CLICKR is a matching game, and if you’re into that, it’s probably great. I’m not into that, so I can’t really speak to its quality. I CLICKED CLOSE.

CLONES features a kind of game design that seems familiar, but I can’t place it. Dudes keep walkin, and all you can do is alter the level so they go the way you want them to. ADIOS.

CLOSURE 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 don’t really get along, and haven’t since time immemorial. SHUT YOUR EYES.

CLOUDBUILT is a third person platforming game where I guess you’re an invisible psychic ghost of your sick and sleeping self? It felt... ‘off.’ Kinda like how Warframe feels ‘off’ after you’ve played Ninja Gaiden Black. The thing is, I like Warframe, even though it’s not Ninja Gaiden Black, so I thought I might keep Cloudbuilt around, but... ehnh. Truth is, I JUST WASN’T FEELING IT.

COBI TREASURE DELUXE is basically a match 3 game combined with tetris. It’s something I’d probably play if I had literally nothing else to play. It’s not offensively bad, it’s 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 there’s a coin-themed world, and you go around spending coins you find to battle people? It’s got some kind of old console-game-that-thinks-it’s-an-rpg-but-there-is-no-roleplay thing going on. It’s 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 it’s one of those grid-based dungeon crawler type games, not, like, an actual first-person real-time game. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t 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 KEEN COMPLETE PACK may be an id game, but it’s a platformer, and, like... man, it’s 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, I’d 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. I’M JUST NOT TOO KEEN ON THEM.

CONSTANT C is another platformer. Look, if you came to me wanting quality opinions on platformers, uh, don’t... do that. Don’t ask me about that. It is not something I am into. OUT LIKE A LIGHT.

CONTAINMENT: THE ZOMBIE PUZZLER should have won me over, considering it features both zombies and match puzzles, especially because of it’s 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 don’t 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 SIMULATOR 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 wasn’t deep enough to be interesting. And maybe that’s the point; the devs spent a lot more time on the player’s personal combat mechanics, and it shows. If you want to brawl with zombies, enjoy it. WHERE YOU LEAD, I CANNOT FOLLOW.

COSMO’S COSMIC ADVENTURE. I didn’t think they sell this one on Steam anymore, because I don’t think the Apogee pack is available, but hey. I googled, and apparently they do. Still, it’s a PLATFORMER.

COSMOCHORIA wouldn’t let me take a screenshot because pressing F12 opens up its Chrome web inspection interface. It’s kinda like if Mario Galaxy was a 2D game? That makes it a PLATFORMER.

COSMONAUTICA sounds like my jam: it’s 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! There’s one problem: the devs abandoned it. If the game had some kind of main quest-line, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t, I’d probably stick with it regardless. I don’t 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 wasn’t 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 doesn’t 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. It’s got a story. It’s going somewhere. I’m not just traveling between towns selling stuff. I’m 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 isn’t Age of Empires 1, which most people don’t 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.

It’s not like I hate the platforming genre, I just haven’t found anything in it to love recently, y’know? I enjoy Rayman’s 2D games. I like Conker’s Bad Fur Day/Live and Reloaded a lot. But the other platformers, man... so many of them, they just don’t excite me. I feel like I’ve seen everything they have to offer. There’s just “some gimmick” and a one or two button interaction with that. Sometimes you memorize button presses and repeat them before moving on.

“But, Doc, you can reduce any genre down to that.” Ehnh... I disagree. There’s a randomness to other real-time games where you don’t have to think about “when an enemy is gonna attack you” or something. There’s a lack of decision making because all you’re doing is moving between two points on a 3D plane. I don’t enjoy Pokemon Fire Red, a 2D game, for the “walking on a 2D plane” bit. I enjoy it for the monster catching/collection completion.

In platformers, that whole “moving on a 2D plane” thing IS the game. And that just doesn’t get my motor running.

Have I talked about this before? I almost feel like I have.

That’s 100 games we’ve 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 that’s 100 games, it’s a 78% rejection rate. Neato.

Back to 20 games per article next time!

#indiebundlecruftdeathmatch