Such a punishing design apparently came from a developer that doesn’t care about the “lessons” learned by modern developers, which typically include some combination of frequent checkpoints, “anywhere” saves, adjustable difficulty, and/or regenerating health.  The lack of a “pause” function can be attributed to the fact that the game is played in a strange sort of quasi-online mode where you can read messages other players leave, watch how other players died, or even join up to fight with some other players at times.  But even online, the developers, From Software, decided to ignore modern conventions for online play:

• There is no voice chat when playing with other players.
• There is no real way to “party up” or arrange to play with your friends or past players you may have met online.
• You cannot choose to continue playing with someone after you’ve defeated a boss.  You are automatically booted back to your own “realm”.
• When playing with others, only 1 player (the “living” player) may make progress in their game (though everyone does get experience).

Since these are pretty much standard in other online environments today, the fact that they’re not included must mean that that they were deliberately omitted by design.  It is amazing to me that a design with such limited accessibility was allowed to exist, but the developers have managed to create a very compelling world.  Still, that doesn’t mean they were right, and I still question some of these design decisions.

I think that the online functionality was probably thought about early in the design, but From Software wanted the game to still basically be a single player game.  Reading messages other people placed would sort of be like an in-game message board.  Summoning other players to your game would kind of be adding an AI henchman to your game, only the AI happened to be human.  It’s a pretty odd way to think about things, but in the context of the game it works.

The problem is, its still an online game, and when you make an online game, people like to socialize and strategize.  If I had to pick one design choice from above as my biggest gripe, it would probably be the lack of voice chat.  People want to communicate with each other, whether its their first time through a level or your guiding someone else through it.  It is extremely annoying losing your group when in multiplayer mode because you have no easy way of finding them.  And its even more annoying when you’re fighting a boss for the first time and have no way of communicating with your ally to discuss strategy.  The only way of communicating in game now is a pre-defined list of about 10 gestures, but they are also extremely slow to use and completely worthless 99% of the time.  I have literally had to use PSN messaging with a few people just to discuss options, and when people are resorting to using a slow-ass, out-of-game virtual keyboard to send messages to each other, maybe it’s about time to just give the players what they obviously want.  I hope that it gets patched in, but I doubt it will.

It might be nice to see some sort of “Casual” mode too that allows for players to party up and play the game in a group as they like, but I’d understand if they didn’t put something like that in.  It might stratify the community too much, and maybe not enough people would be playing the “Normal” mode.

Overall, despite its difficulty and lack of online features, I’m actually quite enjoying the game.  Perhaps that will change as the stakes for dying get ever higher as I progress through the game, as you need ever more souls (experience/money) for each level you gain.  Its easy to see how dying could literally make you lose hours worth of work, and that’s something I probably won’t relish.

Possible Step Forward

• Dante’s Inferno is based on classic literature, which is very rare in video games but actually very common in other established artistic media such as movies and plays.  The more video games can act as an artistic vessel for “classic” stories the more relevant and artistically accepted video games can become.
• The developers seem to be taking the source material very seriously at least as far as the description of Hell (the plot is obviously different).  You can get a sense of this in this development diary.
• Related to keeping to the source material, the developers are absolutely pushing the boundaries of a “mature” subject-matter, both graphically and thematically.  The game includes dead unbaptized babies as enemies, and just reading Kotaku’s new preview of the “Lust” level makes me wonder whether the game will even make it out in its current form.  If its disgusting just to read about I can only imagine how the presentation to the ESRB will go (and, unfortunately, the ESRB has an enormous amount of power right now to basically censor games since no publisher will publish an AO rated game).

On the other hand…

Possible Step Backward

• Aside from being an adaptation of a classic poem, the gameplay Dante’s Inferno is apparently extremely derivative of the God of War series with button for button translations of basically the entire God of War arsenal.  There aren’t many (read “any”) games that have been able to get the God of War formula down as well as the original, and even if Dante’s Inferno manages to do a good job of mimicking it, from the sound of it, it doesn’t sound like they’ve even put their own spin on the game.  And no, a “re-skin” does not count as a new “spin”.
• Are they developers taking the source material seriously or just using it as an excuse to push the boundaries of taste?  Is Dante’s Inferno the videogame equivalent of “torture porn”?  Is EA just trying to cash in on putting a bunch of nudity and over-the-top violence in playable form, not to mention the potential controversy it could generate (and not just the fake kind)?

I find myself interested in how the game turns out, not only because I like the God of War games, but also because I’m curious as to which side of the spectrum it ends up on.

• The characters: the ragdoll-esque main characters are straight out of LittleBigPlanet.  The exact design, of course, isn’t identical, but it’s notably close, right up to the zippered front.  Compare Sackboy with 9.
• The world: I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that the resemblence is as obvious on this front, but I couldn’t help but think of a cross between the LBP and Bioshock (or even Fallout 3) universes.  One scene: where the characters are fighting a mechanical monstrosity in a wrecked, hollow futuristic shell of a factory while playing physics-based tricks with local scenery.  The scale of the ragdoll characters’ world, coupled with the abandoned, rotting sci-fi wasteland, is enormously evocative of the games.  I half-expected to see a Big Daddy.
• The plot: the plot of 9 is paper-thin, but the striking part is that it’s essentially a number of survival set-pieces.  Much like a platformer, the characters careen from one dangerous action-oriented encounter to the next, without much in the way of linkage between the scenarios.  I suspect that had I been controlling them, it would have been a more compelling experience.
• The story arc: Without giving too much away, 9 is about a problem that is almost self-created before being solved by the same protagonists that caused those issues in the first place.  There are a ton of game-related archetypes for this type of arc, although I suppose they’re variations on the Pandora’s Box theme.
• Inventions: Crafting has always been an important element of many post-apocalyptic RPGs, and 9 doesn’t disappoint.  Created items pop up regularly as key elements of the film.

There are a few other debts to be noted, but this gives you a flavor for just how much the contemporary game landscape has contributed to the game - in spirit, if not in practice.  (There are also a ton of similarities with Tim Burton’s last film, Coraline, but since those aren’t game-related I’ll let you consider them on your own.)  I’d bet there’s a solid game to be found inside the unremarkable movie.

The fact that Microsoft now feels inclined to release another adapter, which is supposedly faster, irks me further.  Either the addition is practically worthless (bad), or it’s actually going to provide a more competitive experience with 360 games (worse): who wants to be forced into periodic console upgrades in order to keep a level playing field with others?  This is yet another symptom of the increasing PC-ization of console gaming.

I am curious, however, if the style will actually inhibit or help the gameplay.  It’s one thing to design a game that kinda looks retro, but it’s another to do something useful with it.  Like Chekhov’s gun, if the only point of the style is to make people feel vaguely nostalgic, I think it might actually hurt the game.

When Microsoft originally announced the 3-year warranty extension I was happy that they had finally admitted that there was an issue.  At the same time, though, I figured that I was probably just sitting on a ticking time bomb and wished that they would’ve instead offered an optional recall (as I indicated here and here), since it was clear even back then that this was a design flaw.  As I got closer to my 3-year mark in April I started to worry that it wasn’t going to happen to me in time.  After passing the date with nary an issue (that looked like RROD) I thought that maybe I was in the 30% or so that supposedly had a “good” 360.  Just over 5 months after my RROD warranty extension expired, in the middle of our Beatles: Rock Band release party, my XBox had had enough.

A call into Microsoft today resulted in absolutely no sympathy.  Instead, the foreign customer service agent  tried to convince me of the great deal I was getting by paying $99 to have my XBox repaired.  I resigned myself to the fact that this was the best I was going to do, until I remembered that my credit cards actually extend warranties as well.  I lost my receipt long ago and I got it from a Circuit City, so recovering it was not an option.  Nevertheless, I called American Express and the customer service agent was extremely helpful.  Amazingly, she told me that their extended warranty program would cover me since Microsoft extended it to 3 years for my specific issue (their extended warranty extends it a year after that).  I mentioned that I did not have a receipt and had no way of recovering it and she said that should be fine, that I should just send all the information I have (including the credit card statement).  I was kind of dumbfounded that they would be this nice to me, but I’m not going to complain.  I don’t know if it will work or not yet, but it certainly sounded promising.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been a loyal, debt-free customer with American Express since 2001 that they were happy to help me with this.  I only wish Microsoft treated their loyal customers the same way.

I, for one, will be passing on DJ Hero the first time around despite a strong interest in the game.  A $120 price point is something I have no desire to encourage.

• The songs are so mixed it can be hard to understand a game’s value.  Guitar Hero 1 had, I thought, a pretty good mixture of songs, but since that point I have had a hard time finding a setlist that I thought was truly great.  Rock Band has tried to fix this somewhat through DLC, but frankly, you pay so much up front that I don’t consider it worth it.
• The games are extremely uneven in terms of difficulty.  Guitar Hero 1 was pretty accessible, but GH2 was shockingly difficult by the first game’s standards, and sequels in the genre fall all over the board (Rock Band has some very easy portions and some very difficult ones).
• The target audience for the games varies as well.  Rock Band is best played with others, but since I don’t know a ton of people who have an interest in the genre, it doesn’t make much sense to pick it up.
• They’re expensive.  Shelling out $60 - $200 for a new game - which is essentially the same game as before - is just hard to justify on a regular basis.

Rhythm game fanatics have probably enjoyed most of the entrants into the series, but I suspect more casual players have lost a lot of interest.  What can be done to make these games more interesting?  Lately, all the innovation has focused on changing inputs: adding devices or upgrading them to attempt to make them a closer simulation of real music.  I’d suggest that we should focus a bit more on the mechanics of the game and how it’s sold.  (I’m actually pretty interested in DJ Hero, mostly because it’s so different than what we’ve seen so far, both in terms of gameplay and musical style.

One idea I’d like to see: what about an iTunes-esque “build your own game” format?  Games would come blank, but players could select a series of, say, 15 tracks to download that would become the standard tracklist for their game.  This would ensure that players would only pay for tracks that they really liked, in a style they desired; since DLC right now seems reasonably successful, I don’t see this as being a licensing cost issue.  I’d definitely pay for that.

Other thoughts?

But rather than continue to slog along, making no progress, I’m probably going to give up and accept my 88% completion rate as having “beaten” the game.  This realization made me wonder, though, why some gaming challenges make me play devotedly in the hopes of mastering them, while others inspire no interest whatsoever.

After thinking about it, I think there are probably three main elements to challenges that are of interest to the average player.

First, progress.  There has to be some way for a player to conceive of the possibility that he or she might actually accomplish their goals, and this is often achieved by making the player feel some sort of progress towards the objective.  At its most basic, this might simply be a checkpointing system; more advanced versions are trophies or medals, or a percentage counter on the screen.  Interestingly, the most frustrating games - the ones that make me scream in silent rage at the television - aren’t the ones I have no hope of beating, but the ones where I come so very close and yet fail anyways. 

Second, competition.  This might simply be competition with yourself, such as in Bionic Commando when you play a challenge room over and over again to perfect some combination of moves.  Multiplayer offers another aspect to this, where you can test yourself against other players.  And leaderboards are the ultimate version, because they give you a direct, tangible, and difficult goal.

Finally, reward.  Whether simply recognition (as in leaderboards or publication in a magazine or blog) or a tangible in-game reward (consider Shadow Complex’s gold guns), a player needs to feel that the goal they are working towards is worthwhile.  I suspect people are motivated by different things; if I get nothing useful from a challenge and don’t particularly enjoy the challenge itself from a gameplay angle, I don’t much care about it. 

I have to confess though that I am left with one big puzzle: the appeal of leaderboards.  I have absolutely no interest in leaderboards, mostly because of the progress angle: there is absolutely no chance that I will ever be the top player in the world at anything… so why invest a ton of effort to be player #58,203 at Call of Duty?  Yet a ton of players will play obsessively to do just that, wihtout any hope of additional progress.  It’s the great unsolved mystery of challenges to me.