Talking To Myself (Part I)

Inexplicably, we weren’t invited to take part in Slate’s annual gaming roundtable with N’Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo (I know, I’m as surprised as you are).  But there are a number of points made that I feel are worthy of comment.  As is often the case, I’m much less interested in the game of the year evaluation than I am in the more off-hand questions and comments that each raises, so I’m going to tackle each of these in discrete points.  The topic of this post: Chris Suellentrop’s question about whether or not this year’s gaming produced such widely divergent opinions on the games themselves.

Suellentrop cites Michael Abbot’s love for Fable II, Chris Dahlen on Fallout, Insult Swordfighting on GTA.  Ironically, though, these guys have more in common with each other than Suellentrop notes at first glance, and I think their collective opinions belie their fundamental internal biases towards gaming.  This is, to be sure, not a pejorative - I mostly agree with Dahlen, after all - but I am a little surprised no one picked up on it.  These games are all RPGs.

This may not be initially all that unusual; RPGs are games too.  But all of the participants in the roundtable have a sincere interest in the gaming medium as a source of critical inspiration - witness the long, meditative posts devoted to the importance of narrative, character, ambience, development, moral choice.  These are indeed important facets of the gaming industry, but more to the point, they’re far more easily found in a long, story-driven RPG than the average Mario-style platformer or even innovative puzzle game.  These guys may love their Patapons, but they’re inextricably tied to their Fallouts. 

Let me suggest that each of the panelists here has a natural inclination to prefer RPGs - even in cases where, like Croal, they may not see themselves as favorably inclined towards a typical Dungeons and Dragons-style (or J-) RPG.  However, Croal loved Fallout as well, and was favorably inclined towards an RPG-lite Bioshock.  This is a fundamentally distinct genre of gaming.

Later on, Totilo chastises gamers “for getting what they deserve”: “…25-hour, $60 collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.”

Let me respectfully suggest that there are two ways to fix the above: one is figuring out out to develop stronger stories, but the other is to drop the basic premise that 25-hour repeatable action is all there is out in the world.  How you might compare a game that is fundamentally designed to suck you into its world for an extended period of time with a short-term experience like Patapon is an open question, as is whether or not the latter will ever be able to live up to the former.  But it’s a question worth acknowledging.

The Kids These Days

The Brainy Gamer opens a new post on quality and E-rated games by asking what someone might do if they wanted to find a good game for their kids.  He suggests looking on an aggregator site like Gamerankings and notes that only two games have been well-reviewed recently by at least 20 publications.  Quite reasonably, he wonders if we should reassess how much attention we’re paying to these types of games, lest we ignore good titles in favor of “shoddy, cynical efforts to squeeze money out of the least knowledgeable segment of the game-buying public.”

I actually disagree.

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Violence And Gender

An interesting meditation on gender and violence from Vorpal Bunny Ranch.  Why is it that games with female protagonists seem to be sanitized in a way that, say, Gears of War or Dead Space is not?

I’m not sure I fully agree with the analysis - it seems to conflate the violence of, say, abusive mothers with the shoot-em-up style of Gears of War gore, which to my thinking obscures the issue - but it’s a great starting point for a discussion.

Don’t change the end of your game

Lots of developers try to add a bit of variety to their games by changing the gameplay mechanics for the final boss or stage of their games.  I guess the theory is that gamers crave variety, so throwing something new at them at the end is a good way to bring their games to a climax.  I have some advice for developers: don’t do this.

Unless you really know that you have something good going, chances are that your idea for a “unique” ending will end up worse than the rest of the game.  The reason for this is almost too obvious to post: you spend probably months or years creating and tweaking the core aspects of the game, so the sort of “unique” game that you switch to at the end, and only play for a few minutes (or less), is quite unlikely to have the same attention to detail as the rest of the game that you worked so hard on.  The best bosses/final stages offer something unique, but still ground the game in its core gameplay mechanics.  Yes, as with everything, there are a few exceptions to this.  I found whole final sequence of the original Metal Gear Solid to be pretty exciting.  Yoshi’s Island’s final boss is actually pretty well done and works a bit differently than the rest of the game, but even that is still pretty much grounded in the core aspects of the gameplay.  Halo 1 and 3 have fun endings, but at least driving makes up an fair and important amount of the game, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it completely divergent.  As you can see, I’m struggling to come up with many examples, which should be indicative of something.

I was moved to write this post after just finishing the campaign for Gears of War 2.  I was prepared to be somewhat letdown by the final boss after reading reviews talking about it being disappointing… It’s more than disappointing, it’s a damn joke.  My guess (and hope) is that they had something better planned for it, but ended up essentially scrapping it and putting in what’s currently there when time got short, as it’s honestly not much more than a (slightly) glorified cutscene.  At least Gears of War 1 had a challenging final boss that required some thought to kill.  This one doesn’t do the rest of the game justice.

Not a good sign…

Did you know that Call of Duty: World at War launches today?  Unfortunately, as of yet, there isn’t a single review of the game up yet.  For such a high-profile game, this seems rather strange.

I can only assume that it means something similar to when movies are released without critic screenings.  In other words: Buyer Beware.

Re: Innovation

Site friend Ludwig Kietzmann comments a bit more on the topic of innovation with respect to survival horror games.  I had a post to that effect, although the graphics portion of Wordpress is currently preventing me from posting, so read his instead. 

Survival horror is one of those genres that’s so chock full of terrible conventions that you wonder why they’re retained.  Fortunately, some recent games have jettisoned them and so there’s hope on the way.

Things I Don’t Care About Vol. 1

• “Ultra limited editions” with ultra not-so-limited prices
• A GTA game on the DS, or any of the very purposefully ginned up controversy around it
• Box art (even with puns)
• Drug “censorship” in Fallout 3, (the VP is right)
• A multimedia focused DS
• Regressing to a time when game design was evil (at least, at the moment).

A Digital Convention

Penny Arcade’s Tycho (aka Jerry Holkins) recent comment regarding PAX struck me as a little strange:

“Things went well, but we’ll never be satisfied until the year that every con-goer fuses into a single, omnipotent digital entity. The convention’s biggest hurdle is that it happens to be held within the confines of the physical universe, with its intractable laws and finite space.  I wonder who we can talk to about that.”

Well, how about Microsoft?  Or Blizzard?  Or maybe Mythic, NCSoft, Cryptic Studios, or Linden Labs? I understand what Tycho is referencing here, but in a sense, don’t we already have several different ways for gamers to digitally meet and play together?  We even have several digital ways of gathering information about new, unreleased games that may be shown at these conventions.

The fact that the convention takes place “within the confines of the physical universe” isn’t a “hurdle”, it’s a feature.  Yeah, I get that he’s making a somewhat common geek joke, but I thought it would be helpful to remind people that if PAX were what he claims to want, it wouldn’t be nearly as special to people as it is now.

Manifest Narratives

Brainy Gamer kicked off a discussion of narrative by noting the number of different commentators who have stated a personal opinion regarding how gaming narratives should be constructed.  Michael Abbott refers to these opinions as manifestoes, as they make plain the nominal views of their creators.  However, although each of the opinions is interesting to read, it seems somewhat plain to me that taking a defined position on “gaming narrative” is far too reductionist to fully capture the dynamic of interest to each party.  So this post is an attempt to put some structure around the idea.

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Far Too Human

The Too Human demo has been out for a bit now and I’ve now played through it with all of the classes (to find out how to do this, check out this YouTube link… it’s pretty simple).  While the demo has convinced me to buy the full game, two of the classes just felt completely worthless to me: the Commando and Bio-Engineer.

Let me give you some quick examples.  My first time through the demo with the Champion I obviously had no idea what I was really doing, but by the time I got to the second “timed challenge” (which gives you 40 seconds to kill an onslaught of enemies), I was able to complete it.  With the Berserker and Defender, these timed challenges were incredibly easy, and I beat them with at least 10 seconds to spare.  In my last play through with the Defender, I never died (in fact the closest I ever got was about 1/4 life left) and my combo meter was always maxed out (I think) at 3.  When playing with the Commando and Bio-Engineer, I couldn’t complete any timed challenges, I died 2-3 times, and I’d be lucky to get my combo meter up to 2.  The Defender, by the way, has the added advantage of seemingly not falling over when all those annoying missiles blow up near you, a huge plus in my book as rolling out of the way or shooting them down can be tedious.

Now, there’s obviously a lot of factors that are influencing my thoughts on this: personal preferences, length of the demo (classes start specializing more the longer you play the game, I’m guessing), and basic lack of skills or understanding of how to best play these particular classes.  I don’t have a problem if any of these factors led someone else to another class, but it just seems like there’s something very fundamental about the game that makes the Commando and Bio-engineer poor choices unless you just want a rough ride through the game.  Based on the demo, the gunplay in the game just isn’t nearly well implemented enough to be used as a sort of primary weapon, and the Commando and Bio-Engineer rely far more heavily on guns and grenades.   In that sense, one could potentially look at the Commando and Bio-Engineer as two different “Hard Modes” for the game.

In any case, I’m wondering whether anyone else has given the demo a chance and what their own thoughts on these classes are, particularly if you found them to work pretty well.  I’m also sort of curious as to whether people think unbalancing classes to create a “hard mode” class is a good idea, although I’m a little skeptical of it if that’s sort of the idea in Too Human since it’s also a Co-op game (and who wants to be the weak one when playing with a friend?).