Obsession’s Fallout

I realize I haven’t posted in awhile, and I do apologize. Indeed, my excuse is pretty lame.  Essentially, I’ve just been trying to relax and enjoy the holiday season, and I’ve wanted to play Fallout 3. Work has been extremely stressful as of late, so my first desire hasn’t gone so well so far, but I sure as hell have been playing a hell of a lot of Fallout 3 lately anyway.

It’s hard to describe exactly the kind of hold that Fallout 3 has on me because it hasn’t really happened with a game in a really long time, or at least not nearly as powerfully and lengthy.  The closest it comes is to something like World of Warcraft, which I certainly sank quite a bit of time into (for about 6 months), but I’m not sure I found it nearly as enjoyable when I played and it’s also probably not the best example.

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Back In The Saddle

Well, the 360 is back (and faster than I thought).  I’ve begun GoW2 and I’m lining up the remainder of the ridiculous number of games I have left… further updates as events warrant.

A Defense Of Sonic 3D Games

Everyone seems to hate 3D Sonic game, and honestly, I’m not really sure why.  I loved Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast - although it seems like I’m the only one who did.

Honestly, the 2D games have been an extremely mixed bag for me.  The problem with them is that they trade speed for control; as a result, you fly past meticulously created levels so quickly that you have no idea what’s going on, and are challenged mainly to hit buttons reflexively in time to avoid hitting spikes/animals/miscellaneous obstacles.  This is the worst sort of Panzer Dragoon-ism, and it surprises me that so many people are so nostalgic for it.  Should you dare to slow down enough to locate hidden secrets or examine the landscape, you’ve often inadvertently killed yourself, because speed is so essential to survival.  I often felt cheated by the original games for this reason - they were playing me instead of the reverse.

The 3D games dealt with this by making the fastest parts of the game as stylish as possible: Sonic Adventure kept the on-rails theme but focused on making them highly cinematic (think the Whale sequence on the boardwalk at the beginning of the game).  Sure, you might not have as much control as in a platformer, but at least you were getting a great experience out of it.

It seems likely that people don’t like the new games because they’re not like the old games, and I think Fallout 3 has shown that that’s simply not a fair criticism.  Modifications on a theme are just as valid as slavish recreations.

And while I’m complaining about Gears of War 2…

Epic actually paid someone to write this story?  Without giving anything specific away, let me list off a few complaints:

• The game borrows heavily from several different popular series including Star Wars, The Matrix, zombie movies, and probably others that I’m not mentioning here. I suppose this is to be somewhat expected, as this is a very well-mined genre, but still…
• There are a few jumps in the storyline that are made without much explanation at all.  You’ll know what your current mission is, then suddenly you finish it and you’re told that you need to go somewhere else even if you’re not really sure why.
• As far as I can tell, there’s a critical plot point in the game that undermines the entire reason for continuing onward.  When it came up, I wondered if I understood it correctly.  It becomes a crucial focus of the game, and indeed, I understood it correctly, but was left sort of dumbfounded as to how this could actually be the direction of the story as it basically made no sense.  If you’ve played the game, you probably know what I’m talking about.
• In addition to this, seemingly crucial plot advances/twists are left somewhat unexplored and therefore unimportant to the storyline, despite the fact that they’re originally played up to seem important… I guess they plan to explain them more later? (Though I believe people said the same thing after GoW 1).
• The dialogue is, for the most part, terrible.  This is, unfortunately, the least damaging part of the writing.

The game is pretty well polished and at least a story is told in a somewhat interesting way.  I don’t mind if every loose end isn’t tied up at the end of a game, though it would be nice if they could figure out a way to actually tell a full story within the scope of a single game.  As it is, I feel like we learned very little about some of the more interesting reveals and instead we get basically the framework story of finding another way to try and wipe out the Locust horde.

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.

Murphy’s Law

Naturally, just as I finish Dead Space and come home with Fallout 3 and Gears 2, my 360 stops working.  No red ring of death, but it freezes continuously after a few minutes (whether a disc or hard drive is attached).  Hopefully Microsoft will repair the damn thing, but I can’t say it endears me to the company that I’m going to be out of gaming commission for 3 weeks or so.

Silent’s savvy sales strategy or dumb distribution dilemma?

I took a trip to Blockbuster tonight to return Lego Batman (which I do NOT recommend, but that’s for another post) and to see if they had Silent Hill: Homecoming available to rent.  I took a brief look around the store and didn’t see a case for it, so I asked an employee if they had it.  She checked a few places but then concluded that they did not.  Not just that they didn’t have it in stock, but they actually didn’t carry it.

I was disappointed, but figured maybe the nearby, larger blockbuster carried it.  They called and it was the same story: they didn’t carry it.  I thought it was rather strange since the game has been out about a week now and is somewhat of a moderately hyped game in a long-running series, so after getting in my car I called one more nearby blockbuster to see if they had it.  The guy I spoke to knew exactly what game I was talking about as soon as I mentioned it and was actually quite enthusiastic about it, but then went on to say that he was disappointed that, for some reason, they just didn’t get any copies from the publisher.

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Big World, Big Problem - A Challenge

I’ve recently been playing quite a bit of Mass Effect (I missed the boat initially).  I really love the game, except for the long vehicle sequences that have you driving around on each planet searching for metal deposits and fetch quest items.   It’s just tedious to have to move across huge expanses of mountainous terrian in what is effectively an ATV, for items whose purpose is basically completionist in nature.

While doing so, it occurred to me that Bioware has done a great job creating a massive universe, with purposeless planets, sprawling locales, and side quests galore.  Yet like most RPGs, it runs into a central contradiction: although expansiveness is valuable in creating the sensation of believability, it runs contrary to the central tenet of game design - keep your game fun.  In short, although it’s nice to know there are “real people” out there running about their daily business, they’re not people you really want to interact with.  Nor do you really want to have to move across the massive world in order to have that one conversation that marks the end of your quest and the award of loot or experience points or what have you.  Rather, when you play a game, you want to quickly identify who has something of value to you, interact with them as quickly as possible, and move on to more gameplay, which is the reason you’re playing in the first place. 

Many games attempt to alleviate this problem.  Mass Effect tries to help the process by putting notations on your map to highlight areas of interest; WoW has its exclamation marks, and many games offer “instant warp” spells or airships to ensure that you don’t actually need to cross their worlds in order to get where you need to go.  Yet the fundamental issue - that a massive world is great to see but not to touch - is left unresolved.  Taken to its logical extreme, the “warp” spell reduces the game to a series of scenarios, dialogue trees whose purpose is to load you up with information or items as efficiently as possible.

It seems to me like there has to be a better solution.  Yet I can’t tell you what it is.  Any thoughts on how designers can keep the feeling of exploration and scale in their RPGs, but avoid the tedium of pixel-hunting fetch quests and boring terrain traverses?

One Prospective Answer

IGN takes a stab at the “what next” question, for the 360 at least.  Their prescriptions are basically of three types: cut pricing, redesign the hardwre, and redesign the extras.  As one commenter notes, this might satisfy either the hardcore (who love things like hardware revamps) or the casuals (who could benefit from more accessible controllers or some such) but leaves the fat middle high and dry. 

The pricing issue is essentially adding a peripheral price drop alongside the hardware pricing announcement - I fully agree on  the concept, because peripheral pricing is outrageous for non-cosmetic requirements like wireless adapters ($100) or HDMI cables ($70-$150).  If I can buy an HDMI cable online for $10, this isn’t just insulting, it’s downright offensive.  But regardless, it’s not going to move consoles.  People just don’t research that stuff before making a purchase decision.

The hardware redesign is more interesting; IGN suggests adding Blu-Ray in addition to changing the design of the console and adding a “casual-friendly” remote.  I could see this being useful, and at a bare minimum BD should be offered as an optional add-on.  On the software side, playing up Netflix probably isn’t going to get Microsoft anywhere for a while - people just aren’t using these types of services widely yet - but making Live free would be a huge step to downplaying some of the major structural advantages that Sony retains.

In fact, these mostly seem like prescriptions to fend off Sony rather than to move the industry forward in significant ways.  That may be what Microsoft needs right now.  Sony definitely has more momentum.

So Now What?

Chris Kohler asks the excellent question apropos of the recent Xbox 360 price drop.  He makes the valid point that the console wars are effectively over; Nintendo has won this generation, and neither Microsoft nor Sony are going to reach the position that the PS2 managed to hit in the previous one.  So what is Microsoft doing?

I think that Kohler is largely right in his analysis.   But you need to consider that  that Microsoft isn’t really strictly competing with Sony any longer for the core gamer set: there are outliers, but many gamers have chosen to purchase one or both of the systems at this point.  Both Sony and MS, then, are trying to figure out how to get those remaining holdouts to take a chance on the console they didn’t purchase… and since the feature sets are set at this point, price is basically the only lever they have to pull.  That’s why Microsoft has dropped its pricing for the holidays - not to get people to purchase a 360 instead of a PS3 per se (although I’m sure there are some people who haven’t gotten either yet), but to get people to buy a 360 in addition to the PS3 they’ve already got at home. 

By the way, I’m guessing that with respect to those who haven’t gotten any console yet, I’m guessing a Blu-Ray player isn’t a particularly compelling feature.  Either they’re just unimpressed with either console’s line-up (which I suspect isn’t too likely at this point, even if they’re only passingly familiar with gaming), or they’re just very frugal - and are thus unlikely to have the higher-end hardware required to take full advantage of Blu-Ray in the first place.  So the price drop seems pretty smart to me… Sony’s already lost a ton of money on the PS3 and probably isn’t too interested in losing more in the short term, and thus probably won’t respond too aggressively to the move.  Microsoft can take advantage of that fact.