Destructoid posted a blog about Clint Hocking (the lead designer behind Far Cry 2, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and the latest Prince of Persia) and his discussion at the Game Developers Conference about how, basically, his plans for Far Cry 2 failed.
Kotaku has posted a fascinating article with a comprehensive look into why movies based on videogames will always fail.
Basically, the main reason is that stories in videogames, while important, aren’t exactly considered a “high priority,” but rather a “bonus” if the story is really engaging. In other words, “story” in a videogame is merely meant to satisfy the “why am I doing this” question, nothing more, nothing less.
This is mainly due to the fact that making a videogame is more of a balancing act. Not only does the story have to be at least partially engaging, but it also has to have a solid gameplay experience, which involves artwork, controls, mechanics and physics.
Movies, on the other hand, need to balance the story, acting, and maybe the effects.
What we have here is basically a constant clashing of interests, like trying to make an apple out of oranges, and oranges out of apples. You’re just never going to strike the right taste, simply because there are tastes that are MISSING from either fruit.
Playing F.E.A.R. 2 gave me the closest experience to a cheesy television action series/movie, however. I suspect that this may be due to Warner Bros. involvement with the game’s publishing.
The game had cheesy dialogue, but it was surprisingly witty enough to not take itself too seriously. Some classic lines involved an anonymous radio tipster who calls himself “Snake Fist” and to which a teammate replies, “are you fucking kidding me?”
Another memorable line was, of course, “You’re like free pizza at an anime convention.” Classic.
The scenes involing the player manning a turret, however, truly felt the closest to a cinematic experience.
The first one sets you inside a subway tunnel, enemy forces swarming in on the other side of the tracks. Suddenly, something comes over one of your teammates and he starts to stray into the crossfire chasing after a visage of Alma (the spooky girl gimmick of the game). From a purely gameplay perspective, it just involves haphazardly pounding the enemy soldiers into pieces with your turret, but the main focus of the scene is drawn upon the strange behavior of your teammate. I found myself panning my first person view over to the teammate, as if the camera was “supposed” to be focusing on him.
I also had an extremely positive experience with the last turret scene, where your latino teammate cheers you on as you make enemy bodies fly left and right while cheesy heavy metal music blares in the background. It really felt like being in a campy action flick with quick cuts to explosions and stuntmen throwing their bodies in an exhaggerated fashion.
On top of these movie-like sequences, the pacing of the story really kept me interested till the end, and there was never a moment of feeling bogged down, stuck, or just plain dumb. It was the closest I ever felt to actually being in a movie (even if it’s still far from perfect).
So, my theory is that if we’re ever going to equivocate videogames and movies up to the same level, it will have to be videogames that encorporate movies first, simply because story/atmosphere/art is only just some of the essential elements that make a fantastic game as a whole, whereas it would be everything for a movie.
I must say, having been a part of the “old school Fallout” crowd for quite some time, I was VERY skeptical of the new Fallout. Much to the dismay of the “new comers” to the Fallout universe, who incessently spout that “old school gamers” should sit the fuck down and stfu, it’s NOT because Bethesda took Fallout’s gameplay in a new FPS direction. I’m fine with that. In fact, I’m delighted with the changes.
Nay…my skepticism arose from the tone of the game. Fallout’s always had a wonderful writing cast, and the irony and dark humor that I love so much was never lost in the original series. Upon hearing that they were taking out eye-shots and groin-shots and adding to the fact that Oblivion’s gameplay was utterly boring and dreadful, however, I feared the worst.
Fortunately, my fears were mostly allayed as I began to traverse the world starting as a crawling infant to a fully grown adult. The main storyline was actually engaging, I found myself caring for many of the characters in the game. I noticed a huge improvement in the voice acting department, and I believe they actually doubled the cast of voice actors. Of course, “doubling” the cast of voice actors from two leaves us with merely four voice actors, and once again I felt slightly disillusioned once I realized how the voice actors were being recycled again, but it wasn’t as obviously bad as Oblivion used to be.
The level up system was much better than before as well. I’m glad they kept the skills, but I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed with the SPECIAL system and the perks. In previous fallouts, your base stats actually had a huge impact on how the world would react to the player. If you had low intelligence, you really suffered with dialogue. If you had low charisma, people really acted like you were beaten with an ugly stick several times. In Fallout 3, this aspect was toned down and basically the only real deciding factor in the game was your skill points. Sure, you may get a different line to say every once in a while if you have high enough intelligence, but it’s not a deciding factor if you have enough speech or any other skill depending on the situation. In other words, there’s multiple ways to get to the same “win” result, but not enough restrictive ways to “fail.” That, my friends, is a mark of watered down RPG mechanics.
On a similar note, almost half the perks are utterly useless. Of course, the previous Fallouts had useless perks as well, but instead of being useless and hollow “boosts”, they were more in line with creating a “style” with your character. They were the tools with which to carve your David, not just extra padding on your blow up doll.
Let’s look at an example, shall we?
The perk “Gun Nut”adds 5 skill points per rank for small arms and repair.
At first glance, it may seem like a very good choice if you are planning to create a character focusing on regular handguns and rifles(which there is always plenty of lying around in the wastelands). However, in the grand scheme of things, taking this perk is practically shooting yourself in the foot since 5 skill points is hardly an improvement over the vast amount of skill points PER LEVEL you would get if you had max intelligence. In the face of being able to raise your base stats (especially intelligence) which affects your skill points PER LEVEL, choosing a measly 5 points pales in comparison.
Also, like Fable 2, Fallout 3 suffers from premature ejaculation. Bethesda created a MASSIVE world with many, many side quests, but it’s really up to you to uncover them all. Naturally, one might think that doing the main quest would open up most of the important areas, but beware: the game actually ends before you are ready to end it. I actually ended up not even reaching the max level of 20, stocked up thousands of stimpacks, ammo and weapons for the final battle, and ended up beating the game by accident. Really Bethesda, would it be too much to ask to be able to continue the game after finishing the main story? Part of the fun of RPG’s is building up a character to actually USE the perfected character, you know.
Despite these setbacks, Fallout 3 is still impressive in its own right, it’s really just a few major hitches along the way that really prevent the game from giving that “shiny polished perfect” game.
There’s a great article piece written by Ashley Davis at Destructoid.com that shows an innocent person’s triumph and understanding of what “hardcore” retro gaming was all about.
It reminded me a lot of my days as a young boy playing Megaman 3, how I got very frustrated with Megaman’s limitations but soon learned to work around those limits and conquer the bosses by learning attack patterns and how to avoid them.
Upon playing Megaman 9, 12 years after last playing the old school megaman games, I found myself discovering a lot of the things mentioned in the article…learning obstacles, how to pass through them, how to beat bosses. Each death was as much a step back as it was a step forward, as I found myself flying through stages at an almost speed-run pace, almost never getting hit, just to get to retry that difficult room that I died in. It took patience for sure, and I needed to take breaks to save my blood pressure, but passing through them made them feel like they weren’t so bad after all. I’m certain there’s a lot about life we can learn from these sorts of challenges we face in the megaman series as well.
Each obstacle we face in life is merely a chance to come back harder, faster and stronger. It may break us in the moment, but the next time we collect the pieces of ourselves and start running again, we’ll be faster, more efficient, less prone to the same pitfalls and laughing as we blast through past mistakes and prevent further similar mistakes. At the end of the day, you become proud of who you really are.
Our previous discussion into the MMORPG concept took a fairly critical view of the genre itself, but having gone into a “relapse” into the MMO world once again, I have found several positive aspects found in our online fantasy worlds.
The most obvious of these, of course, is the social interactivity. We as humans need a certain amount of social interactivity in our lives, but we as gamers also need a “special” kind of social networking, and what better way is there than interacting through our most favorite medium?
With the advent of microphone-based chat room programs such as Teamspeak or Ventrilo, mmorpg’s have been taken to another level of social networking. Hearing another human being on the other side is far more engrossing than reading text on a computer screen, obviously. It’s no surprise that most guilds are almost guaranteed to use these programs and encourage members to use it.
Let’s split this into the PVP and PVE categories.
In cases where two groups of players are relatively equally matched, teamwork and cooperation among players is paramount to victory. Voice chat seamlessly integrates communication into the game, eliminating the time it takes to type a strategy out (and thereby leaving your avatar more helpless than a sheep with a farmboy). This is especially true in timing specific situations such as Arenas in WoW. In the PVE aspect, it tends to be a way for players to wind down and just talk about everything in general. The daily grind can get quickly tedious and repetitive, but it seems to melt away when you’re talking to your friends online. I’ve come to realize that indeed, it’s not necessarily the game itself that makes an MMO addictive… it’s the community, and the sense of belonging. Conventions such as PAX have become huge successes and is still growing every year. Game shows and other conventions are opening up more and more to the gaming public, but it appears that it’s not only about the latest and greatest, the newest freshest marketing campaigns, the booth babes… it’s about being part of a community, fulfilling that essential human need to belong, where humans can accept each other regardless of who they are or where they came from, and transcends all the politics and drama that clutters our chaotic world today.
While we’re on the subject of how Games can improve as a meaningful medium: above is an interesting little lecture by Daniel Floyd, a professor from the Savannah College of Art and Design, done in Zero-Punctuation style.
After several amusing hours on the recent Grand Theft Auto game, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the game’s storytelling department had matured greatly. No longer was it about mindless criminal intents with piss poor reasoning. Gone were the static characters that simply didn’t have any good reasons for their actions(or even a good reason to live). Now we have themes of financial struggles, moral issues concerning life and death, mistakes one makes in life and how people overcome them or succumb to them.
I mentioned some of these themes in my review, but the biggest theme that seemed to circulate within the various missions and side missions seemed to be about one thing: money. After all, money makes the world go ’round, right? In the world of GTA4, however, things aren’t exactly what they seem.
One of the biggest complaints against GTA4 was that you didn’t have anything much to DO with the money you earned. Buying new clothes, paying for meals or recreational activities hardly put a dent in your wallet, and before you know it, being “poor” in the game seems like just another ironic joke. Of course for the characters, they yearned for more money. For what? “The ultimate American dream”. In other words, the characters portray a certain symptom that many people in this world have: consumer greed. But that’s what America’s all about, is it not? The Pursuit of “happiness”, which in this satirical videogame world means resorting to extreme materialism.
After the great amount of features in previous GTA titles, it certainly seems strange that they would leave out such an important aspect of managing money…unless it was intentional. I know this seems a bit of a stretch, but even if it wasn’t intentional, it still reached me as a player, and made me think about how we are all searching for money to fulfill our hopes and dreams, and how vast amounts of money will never be enough as long as we continue to strive for materialistic rewards.
Imagine how deep games could be if they could teach us in such ways.
Yes, this game is hardly a game, but it still gives us a taste of real-world horror after realizing that there’s no turning back after a certain choice. Not even exiting and restarting the game gives you a second chance to remedy your actions. At the very least, this “game” made me realize just how we gamers take the saving/loading system for granted. The last time I’ve seen anything like this happen was in the Diablo II hardcore mode, which made me shudder to think how one’s fate is decided by internet lag more than anything.
Games have always boasted themes about how they are “deep” due to their “choice” systems. Bioshock was acclaimed as one such game, and although it is exciting to see the beginnings of a growing and maturing medium (like watching a toddler’s first steps) it’s still not enough to actually give insights into human nature in subtle ways. Let’s hope that games continue to walk further into these unexplored areas.
Before the era of World of Warcraft and Lineage came about, MMORPGs(Mass Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) have always been a part of a smaller community of players whose previous generation consisted of tabletop “gamers” who were infamous for their stereotypical image of nights spent in dark, secluded basements filled with magic, adventure, romance, or as others may put it, people with too much time and imagination.
This was the era of Dungeons and Dragons, whose creator, Gary Gygax, recently passed away.
This was an era preceding the advancement of internet and mass-production of computers, so in all fairness, these were an incredibly bright community of people who were capable of “imagineering” their own games in their head, with a healthy dose of math and rolling of the dice.
Just as the calculator harshly cut the necessity for manual calculation using one’s own cranial capabilities, videogames also began to delve into its share of randomization(i.e. rolling dice) and also took care of the imagineering as well.
The community still remained at large while the advent of machinized gaming slowly began to rise from its infantile state, with members of its community behaving almost like a proud secret society, being able to instantly recall every aspect of their alter-egos down to the most trivial of numerical statistics.
As all things analog, this too fell prone to the merciless age of digitalization.
What did this transition truly entail?
At this point I would like to introduce the tripod that is the foundation of all MMORPG’s, the vicious circle:
10 million players around the world are clutched willingly (or unwillingly) within the confines of this circular gameplay.
We begin with what is usually small tasks and challenges, which leads to a small boost in effort, and an eventual reward. These challenges gradually begin to demand more and more time from the player, with promises of greater rewards. What do these rewards entail? 90% of the time, it entails powerful items and crafts to which you make your alter-ego even stronger than before. MMORPGs and its players always have a single goal: to create and become one of the strongest players in the world. Whether this is truly attainable is debatable, but often times the ultimate (yet sadly inadequate) answer for all addictees is PvP (player vs. player) combat which ironically again, leads to yet more powerful items.
The unfortunate consequence for all this is that some addictees end up committing a dangerously large amount of time into it, perhaps intentionally blinding themselves to the vanity of the whole MMORPG’s circular process. The uneducated media and masses have an excuse to blame the game itself because nobody seems to have properly explained the MMO concept, which I have hopefully clarified in a small way. I hope that after reading this, readers will know what and why they are addicted to certain online role-playing games, and cannot use the excuse that the game is purely at fault for their irresponsibility.
If our beloved industry is to move forward, I believe MMO’s need to break free of this materialistic vicious cycle, and focus rather on what made “roleplaying” fun and intelligent in the first place: the social imagineering. After all, the best way to redeem oneself in giving an excuse for ultimately wasted time is saying that “the journey was memorable and educational”.
Author’s Note: I am aware of “Roleplaying servers” differentiated from the other normal servers in certain MMO’s, but they are usually (from my personal experience) not taken as seriously and the grind for rewards is still such a large presence that it ruins any hopes for a meaningful “roleplaying” experience.
