I AM A LAZY UPDATER
Freelancer was an amazingly fun game, and if you haven't played it I strongly suggest you do. It certainly shows its age, but it ages gracefully - it's still a gorgeous game, and still a blast to play. I've read it as being called "Diablo II in space," and that's not an inaccurate assessment. You fly around in a semi-sandbox environment and blow shit up. You can make money trading commodities, ala the old spacefaring trader games like Escape Velocity on the Mac and Elite way before that, back in the stone age of computer gaming. Unfortunately, all the commodity prices are static, which makes that particular avenue get old after awhile. A dynamic economy would've make trading much more interesting and viable.
Let's talk really briefly about the story of Freelancer, since that's sort of what I do around here. It's set about 800 years after Starlancer, a game which I didn't play. To escape the endless war and strife that had befallen our solar system, five colony ships are launched to begin anew in the stars around Sirius. Four of them arrive safely, and the resulting civilizations are arranged into four "houses," each roughly analagous to the culture which its sleeper ship came from - the Liberty obviously formed from America, the Bretonia from Britain, Kusari from Japan, and Rheinland from Germany. Each house displays some mildly stereotypical qualities of its ancestral nation. Unfortunately, during the sandbox gameplay the single male voice and handful of female voices for every NPC in the game partially destroys this sense of cultural difference.
The main single player storyline and missions, however, are really quite well done and compelling, complemented by great voice acting even from a couple big-name actors such as George Takei and John Rhys-Davies. And during the storyline and its seamless cinematics, people even have ACCENTS! Imagine that. In the bar on most worlds, you can view the news stories that are available across known space and specifically at the system or planetary levels. Though text only and containing occasional typos, they're generally quite well written and informative, and if you take the time to read them they do a lot to help flesh out the illusion of a rich universe.
During the main storyline, the story is told very cinematically, either onworld or in space, frequently taking control of the game to do so. This isn't as jarring as it sounds - in general the cinematics are very well done, and only in a couple places are they mildly annoying. The story itself is one of political intrigue which gradually gives way to a secret alien invasion. During the first two-thirds or so of the storyline, the player is caught up in a series of events that put him and his NPC comrades on the run, fugitives from the house governments one by one. While on the run and laying low, one can watch through the news feeds as tensions increasingly escalate between the houses, briefly resulting in open war. I really liked the feeling this evoked - knowing that you play a part and are affected by these political machinations, but at the same time being small and beneath the scale of the events that are unfolding. Of course, in the end you save humanity and all that usual stuff, which is satisfying in and of itself, but during this part you gradually fall out of touch with what's going on with everyone else, and focus almost entirely on your missions with the crowd of characters that you're with.
Despite some aspects which make the universe seem somewhat less alive than it rightly should be, Freelancer's original intended scale necessitated some cutbacks, and I can understand how that might happen. A lot of spacefaring game plots seem to revolve around "A vs. B, shoot 'em down," and while a lot of the sandbox missions are boring in that sense, the element of political intrigue and the coloration of interstellar events by the news makes Freelancer much more interesting. It's become one of those games that I reinstall every two years or so and play through again, because it's just so much fun.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Thursday, November 27, 2008
On Left 4 Dead
If ever there was a game I shouldn't be writing about on here, it's probably Left 4 Dead. This blog is meant to look at the element of story in video games; Left 4 Dead's story can be summarized in two words.
ZOMBIES! RUN!
This leaves me with precious little to analyze. But I feel the need to say SOMETHING about the game, and since this is my own personal venue for video game-related rants and raves, I might as well put it to use.
The very first thing I want to recognize is that Left 4 Dead is a good game. It's an enjoyable experience, as are a lot of things as of late that have come from Valve, and they've certainly done many right. My problem is that I don't feel the same sense of divine revelation at its release that every other person on the goddamn internet seems to feel. My concerns with it are all pretty much gameplay-related, and most of them probably a little nitpicky.
I broke in the game with three friends at a LAN party on release weekend, which is how I feel this game SHOULD be played. I greatly appreciate the focus on co-op and looking out for your teammates, and there's an added dimension you get from knowing and being in the same room with the other three people. But after just a few marathon sessions of the game, I began to feel concerned about its replayability, in a number of ways.
Though each character is different, and has some personality of their own, they are functionally identical. From a gameplay perspective, it really makes no difference who you play as, except in a social sense (my group, for example, have all settled into our own characters whom we always play as). Therefore, there's no incentive to play through a campaign again with another character as there might be if they had different proficiencies. Maybe Zoey is a bit faster than the rest and is really accurate with pistols, and maybe as the grizzled vet Bill is better with an assault rifle or is a better sniper than any of the others. Valve has said something to the effect of wanting to make the characters individual and unique, like characters in a zombie film, and I think there's a missed opportunity in not creating each with their individual strengths and weaknesses. That sort of thing would lead to an even stronger sense of teamwork, as you each cover the other's weak points and allow someone whose character is better at a task take the lead when it's called for.
The campaigns themselves are great fun...the first time through. Even with an AI director entity who randomizes the zombies and weapon/item locations, they start to feel a bit stale by around the third playthrough, to me. Considering there's only four to choose from, this limits the game's replayability quite a lot. I love the idea of the climaxes, holding off a horde of undead while waiting for rescue to arrive, and as promised it's intense and requires tight teamwork. The final stage of Blood Harvest, which requires the defense of a farmhouse, is one which my group has tried and failed at enough times to develop a working strategy down to a science. But once we were victorious, the subsequent victories don't yield the same sense of elation as before. If the technology could be developed to allow the AI director to not only randomize the undead but also the very layout of the map, allowing for a different route every time, that would contribute a lot to replayability. The environment also feels rather static and uninteractive to me - the cornfield on Blood Harvest is little more than flat sprites that look like something appropriate for a game from eight years ago.
One other area where I feel Valve dropped the ball is the Versus mode, which I was very excited about. Back when the game was still in heavy development, I heard tell of a mode where another player could take the place of the AI director - control the zombie hordes, choose their placement and timing, and so on. I loved the idea of this. I wanted to scare the living shit out of my friends with a well-placed horde of zombies when they least expected it. Even after it became apparent that this wasn't happening, and that you'd only get to play as the boss infected, I was still looking forward to it. As a veteran of multiplayer Aliens vs. Predator who always played as the Alien, I wanted to try the hunter's wall-climbing and leaping. In practice, the infected don't control particularly well and are difficult to play as, and I get frustrated by constantly dying. I especially dislike not being able to choose what type of infected to spawn as. Versus mode feels unfinished and tacked on.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of a game based around teamwork with the look and feel of a zombie apocalypse film is just awesome. I hear that there will very soon be downloadable content, which may in fact alleviate some of these concerns. I appreciate what Valve has done.
I just wish they could've done it MORE.
ZOMBIES! RUN!
This leaves me with precious little to analyze. But I feel the need to say SOMETHING about the game, and since this is my own personal venue for video game-related rants and raves, I might as well put it to use.
The very first thing I want to recognize is that Left 4 Dead is a good game. It's an enjoyable experience, as are a lot of things as of late that have come from Valve, and they've certainly done many right. My problem is that I don't feel the same sense of divine revelation at its release that every other person on the goddamn internet seems to feel. My concerns with it are all pretty much gameplay-related, and most of them probably a little nitpicky.
I broke in the game with three friends at a LAN party on release weekend, which is how I feel this game SHOULD be played. I greatly appreciate the focus on co-op and looking out for your teammates, and there's an added dimension you get from knowing and being in the same room with the other three people. But after just a few marathon sessions of the game, I began to feel concerned about its replayability, in a number of ways.
Though each character is different, and has some personality of their own, they are functionally identical. From a gameplay perspective, it really makes no difference who you play as, except in a social sense (my group, for example, have all settled into our own characters whom we always play as). Therefore, there's no incentive to play through a campaign again with another character as there might be if they had different proficiencies. Maybe Zoey is a bit faster than the rest and is really accurate with pistols, and maybe as the grizzled vet Bill is better with an assault rifle or is a better sniper than any of the others. Valve has said something to the effect of wanting to make the characters individual and unique, like characters in a zombie film, and I think there's a missed opportunity in not creating each with their individual strengths and weaknesses. That sort of thing would lead to an even stronger sense of teamwork, as you each cover the other's weak points and allow someone whose character is better at a task take the lead when it's called for.
The campaigns themselves are great fun...the first time through. Even with an AI director entity who randomizes the zombies and weapon/item locations, they start to feel a bit stale by around the third playthrough, to me. Considering there's only four to choose from, this limits the game's replayability quite a lot. I love the idea of the climaxes, holding off a horde of undead while waiting for rescue to arrive, and as promised it's intense and requires tight teamwork. The final stage of Blood Harvest, which requires the defense of a farmhouse, is one which my group has tried and failed at enough times to develop a working strategy down to a science. But once we were victorious, the subsequent victories don't yield the same sense of elation as before. If the technology could be developed to allow the AI director to not only randomize the undead but also the very layout of the map, allowing for a different route every time, that would contribute a lot to replayability. The environment also feels rather static and uninteractive to me - the cornfield on Blood Harvest is little more than flat sprites that look like something appropriate for a game from eight years ago.
One other area where I feel Valve dropped the ball is the Versus mode, which I was very excited about. Back when the game was still in heavy development, I heard tell of a mode where another player could take the place of the AI director - control the zombie hordes, choose their placement and timing, and so on. I loved the idea of this. I wanted to scare the living shit out of my friends with a well-placed horde of zombies when they least expected it. Even after it became apparent that this wasn't happening, and that you'd only get to play as the boss infected, I was still looking forward to it. As a veteran of multiplayer Aliens vs. Predator who always played as the Alien, I wanted to try the hunter's wall-climbing and leaping. In practice, the infected don't control particularly well and are difficult to play as, and I get frustrated by constantly dying. I especially dislike not being able to choose what type of infected to spawn as. Versus mode feels unfinished and tacked on.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of a game based around teamwork with the look and feel of a zombie apocalypse film is just awesome. I hear that there will very soon be downloadable content, which may in fact alleviate some of these concerns. I appreciate what Valve has done.
I just wish they could've done it MORE.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
On Marathon
Here we go.
One of my absolute favorite game trilogies ever made is really very old-school. Back in the day, when they were still cool, Bungie software consisted of a handful of guys making mac games out of their Chicago apartment. In the vein of Doom, this old sprite-based 2.5D first-person shooter frankly blew away Doom and all other competitors, but didn't sell nearly as well because at the time it was Mac-only; it made waves in the Mac gaming community, but outside of that it barely got noticed.
Today, the game can be played on almost any platform, with a little effort. Doesn't even cost money. Hooray!
Let's talk a little bit about what Marathon has that Doom did not - namely, a story. Sure, Doom had a basic plot, but Marathon's is so deep and convoluted that even today people are trying to tie up parts of it. The universe these games take place in is so well-developed, if you know where to look, and it puts most modern games to shame in that regard. This was in a time before cinematic cutscenes, or ingame scripted actions - everything that happened had to be done with the AI and clever level design. But Bungie added a great element to the game which singlehandedly has provided hungry fans with all the material they need to work with in order to try and suss out the intricacies of Marathon's universe - the computer terminal.
Each level in the games had at least one computer terminal, usually more in the area of six or seven of them. Walking up to these and pressing the action key would bring up a text-based terminal, often accompanied by some images, by which other characters could communicate with the player and give him instructions and sometimes teleport him to different locations. Instead of today's games, which present the player with scripted and interactive cutscenes, pre-rendered full-motion videos and the like, Marathon essentially presented the player with a book in between all the killing.
It's impossible to summarize the plots of all three games in the space I want to use, but the basics are this - you are (it is generally accepted) an enhanced Mjolnir mark IV cyborg (hmm, that sounds familiar, huh? More on that later...) defending the colony ship Marathon from alien slavers called the Pfhor who have invaded it. The colony ship departed Earth a long time ago for Tau Ceti, and a colony has been established down there (though you never actually go to it). The Marathon has three AIs on board, and the one you'll become most intimately familiar with is Durandal. AIs can develop into a state called Rampancy, in which they essentially go insane. Durandal is obsessed with first gaining his freedom and then, in the later games, in his quest for immortality and escaping the end of the universe, billions of years from now. He uses the player as a tool against the Pfhor, eventually stealing their scoutship at the end of the first game and teleporting the player onboard with him.
In what other game can you play as the destructive, vengeful right hand of an insane computer?
Durandal frequently teleports the player into the worst of the fighting, or into areas where the more human crew of his ship would not survive, often with a cavalier attitude that boils down to "Oh, you'll be fine." The plot doesn't need to go beyond this, providing the perfect excuse for you to simply kill tons of enemies, but it does - oh so much farther. There are schemes in the first game, rivalries between the AIs, and a bit of a surprise twist of how the Pfhor found the Marathon in the first place, and why Durandal has entered Rampancy.
In the second game you're on the homeworld of the S'pht, a cybernetic race enslaved by the Pfhor, sifting through their old computer terminals to learn about their history, in an effort to free them and to find a piece of technology that Durandal desperately wants. You also get tidbits of backstory about other races that inhabit the galaxy, such as the Nar, who sprang into existence shortly after the universe did, and use delightfully archaic means to get things done - such as tugging on a planet with a massive chain attached to a spaceship to change its orbit. Cool things that you never actually see in the game because they were at the time far beyond its ability to replicate are given to you in terminals, in text, and your imagination (remember what that is?) is left to give them life. In so many games nowadays, if the engine can't create something, it just doesn't exist. There is no world outside the game levels.
So what of Halo, every frat boy's favorite game series? I usually dismiss Halo, partly because Bungie sold out to Microsoft and abandoned their computer-based loyalists, and partly because halo is really nothing that special. There are some recognizable Bungie touches to it, such as persistent corpses that go flying with explosions (back when this wasn't the norm), but overall it's just a run-of-the-mill shooter. So why am I even mentioning it here?
There are some parallels between Marathon and Halo, and I'm convinced that they take place in the same universe, though the two are definitely separate and one doesn't impact on the other at all. There's a blank gap in Marathon's timeline of about a century or so, when the Marathon is en route to Tau Ceti, and the dates quite neatly line up with the time period in which Halo takes place. The ship had ten Mjolnir Mark IV cyborgs onboard, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Halo's Spartans are Mjolnir Mark V cyborgs. Cortana is an AI, though obviously much more graphical, and the names Cortana and Durandal are related, if you bother to look it up. I think it's interesting to think that the galaxy is large enough for these two timelines to take place simultaneously, that when the Marathon reaches Tau Ceti, the technology onboard is actually outdated. The idea that Halo and Marathon share a common universe has also prompted some great non-canon fan works, such as the Enkidu terminals, which were at first thought to be genuine teasers from Bungie.
But in the end, Halo doesn't share the same sense of storytelling that Marathon does. There's a secret sort of reward in Halo 3 I hear, some text-based computer terminals that strike me as being a sort of nod to its roots. For the most part though, it's got nothing to distinguish it in the same way that Marathon told a story of being manipulated by an insane computer who was obsessed with his own survival and godhood at a time when all other games had you running around trying to find the red key.
One of my absolute favorite game trilogies ever made is really very old-school. Back in the day, when they were still cool, Bungie software consisted of a handful of guys making mac games out of their Chicago apartment. In the vein of Doom, this old sprite-based 2.5D first-person shooter frankly blew away Doom and all other competitors, but didn't sell nearly as well because at the time it was Mac-only; it made waves in the Mac gaming community, but outside of that it barely got noticed.
Today, the game can be played on almost any platform, with a little effort. Doesn't even cost money. Hooray!
Let's talk a little bit about what Marathon has that Doom did not - namely, a story. Sure, Doom had a basic plot, but Marathon's is so deep and convoluted that even today people are trying to tie up parts of it. The universe these games take place in is so well-developed, if you know where to look, and it puts most modern games to shame in that regard. This was in a time before cinematic cutscenes, or ingame scripted actions - everything that happened had to be done with the AI and clever level design. But Bungie added a great element to the game which singlehandedly has provided hungry fans with all the material they need to work with in order to try and suss out the intricacies of Marathon's universe - the computer terminal.
Each level in the games had at least one computer terminal, usually more in the area of six or seven of them. Walking up to these and pressing the action key would bring up a text-based terminal, often accompanied by some images, by which other characters could communicate with the player and give him instructions and sometimes teleport him to different locations. Instead of today's games, which present the player with scripted and interactive cutscenes, pre-rendered full-motion videos and the like, Marathon essentially presented the player with a book in between all the killing.
It's impossible to summarize the plots of all three games in the space I want to use, but the basics are this - you are (it is generally accepted) an enhanced Mjolnir mark IV cyborg (hmm, that sounds familiar, huh? More on that later...) defending the colony ship Marathon from alien slavers called the Pfhor who have invaded it. The colony ship departed Earth a long time ago for Tau Ceti, and a colony has been established down there (though you never actually go to it). The Marathon has three AIs on board, and the one you'll become most intimately familiar with is Durandal. AIs can develop into a state called Rampancy, in which they essentially go insane. Durandal is obsessed with first gaining his freedom and then, in the later games, in his quest for immortality and escaping the end of the universe, billions of years from now. He uses the player as a tool against the Pfhor, eventually stealing their scoutship at the end of the first game and teleporting the player onboard with him.
In what other game can you play as the destructive, vengeful right hand of an insane computer?
Durandal frequently teleports the player into the worst of the fighting, or into areas where the more human crew of his ship would not survive, often with a cavalier attitude that boils down to "Oh, you'll be fine." The plot doesn't need to go beyond this, providing the perfect excuse for you to simply kill tons of enemies, but it does - oh so much farther. There are schemes in the first game, rivalries between the AIs, and a bit of a surprise twist of how the Pfhor found the Marathon in the first place, and why Durandal has entered Rampancy.
In the second game you're on the homeworld of the S'pht, a cybernetic race enslaved by the Pfhor, sifting through their old computer terminals to learn about their history, in an effort to free them and to find a piece of technology that Durandal desperately wants. You also get tidbits of backstory about other races that inhabit the galaxy, such as the Nar, who sprang into existence shortly after the universe did, and use delightfully archaic means to get things done - such as tugging on a planet with a massive chain attached to a spaceship to change its orbit. Cool things that you never actually see in the game because they were at the time far beyond its ability to replicate are given to you in terminals, in text, and your imagination (remember what that is?) is left to give them life. In so many games nowadays, if the engine can't create something, it just doesn't exist. There is no world outside the game levels.
So what of Halo, every frat boy's favorite game series? I usually dismiss Halo, partly because Bungie sold out to Microsoft and abandoned their computer-based loyalists, and partly because halo is really nothing that special. There are some recognizable Bungie touches to it, such as persistent corpses that go flying with explosions (back when this wasn't the norm), but overall it's just a run-of-the-mill shooter. So why am I even mentioning it here?
There are some parallels between Marathon and Halo, and I'm convinced that they take place in the same universe, though the two are definitely separate and one doesn't impact on the other at all. There's a blank gap in Marathon's timeline of about a century or so, when the Marathon is en route to Tau Ceti, and the dates quite neatly line up with the time period in which Halo takes place. The ship had ten Mjolnir Mark IV cyborgs onboard, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Halo's Spartans are Mjolnir Mark V cyborgs. Cortana is an AI, though obviously much more graphical, and the names Cortana and Durandal are related, if you bother to look it up. I think it's interesting to think that the galaxy is large enough for these two timelines to take place simultaneously, that when the Marathon reaches Tau Ceti, the technology onboard is actually outdated. The idea that Halo and Marathon share a common universe has also prompted some great non-canon fan works, such as the Enkidu terminals, which were at first thought to be genuine teasers from Bungie.
But in the end, Halo doesn't share the same sense of storytelling that Marathon does. There's a secret sort of reward in Halo 3 I hear, some text-based computer terminals that strike me as being a sort of nod to its roots. For the most part though, it's got nothing to distinguish it in the same way that Marathon told a story of being manipulated by an insane computer who was obsessed with his own survival and godhood at a time when all other games had you running around trying to find the red key.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
On Assassin's Creed
Hey, it's been awhile.
I'd intended my next post to be about Bungie's other set of games that ate up a huge portion of my life with their modding potential back in the day, but I just finished playing Assassin's Creed for the PC, and I figure it's worth talking about while the game is still fresh.
My impression of the general reactions to this game is that there seem to be a lot of people hating it just because they can. Even from friends of mine, I've heard complaints about how "stupid" the sci-fi future Abstergo portions of the game are, and that it should have just been made as a game set in Altair's time.
Personally, I loved the game. It doesn't do everything perfectly, for sure. Bad things out of the way first. I realize that with the whole sandboxed open-world thing, it's good to give players something to do, small objectives to accomplish within that free range setting, and I endorse that. But some of the "investigations" you have to do are silly and not fun at all. Flag collection while under a timer? If you miss just one, you're pretty well screwed. That challenge isn't fun, it's just annoying. Pickpocketing missions can be cool, but towards the end the places they're set in just make things more frustrating - guards who'll let your target pass but not you, lepers who shove you and break your cover, failing the mission, and so on and so forth. Combat gets really repetitive and frustrating. I found it annoying and lacking in credibility that everybody in this world seems able to do the same parkour stunts that I can. The last half hour or so of gameplay is frustrating and really just a whole shitload of combat, which is something that I've established needs to be interspersed with other stuff to be any fun. And perhaps the biggest "WTF?" moment I had was when I realized that, as a deadly, highly trained assassin who can run and leap across rooftops and climb up walls, I apparently never learned how to swim.
And somehow, all those things get mitigated mostly by the simple experience of playing the game, at least to me. Even with a frustrating, repetitive combat system, the game does a good enough job making me feel like a badass that I just don't mind. The designers seemed to have lost sight of the point of their game at some point, which is of course the assassinations. I loved the rush of chasing down a target as he flees in complete terror, and leaping onto his back, driving my hidden blade home through his throat, but all the planning, the information gleaned from investigations, came down to nothing in the end as I broke out in a run towards the target and everything burst into chaos. I suppose that it was up to ME more than anything to compose an elegant plan and execute it flawlessly, though.
The story (which HEY HO is the point of my blog, here) is great, in my opinion. Though there are quite a lot of historical inaccuracies, it's frankly awesome to see a game set in this time period. It's funny that with all of recorded human history, most games just take place in medieval fantasy or sci-fi space settings. I think this time period is something that hasn't been touched on much.
The pseudoscience about DNA memory and the Animus I completely bought - I love neat ideas like that, and I thought it was pulled off quite well. I didn't have any problems with the game-within-a-game, and the real setting being in the near future. A large portion of the story for that part of the game is conveyed through the emails stored on the computers, and this text-based revelation is something that I'm a big fan of. Also, there are references to some occult and other paranormal artifacts and incidents in mankind's history that I personally found compelling.
The story within the Animus with Altair is rather less headgamey, with an unfortunately predictable twist and what I felt to be a blatantly obvious mechanic to force the player to learn the ropes while keeping Altair's character seasoned and experienced. Each assassination target, when killed, leaps into a soliloquy about his motives and his perspective on what he's doing, but I never really felt the connections they had to each other and the significance that they held as targets. The whole plot of the game was overshadowed by the actual gameplay experience in town, and your investigations don't help uncover anything of significance except for ways to eliminate your target. The story that is there is pumped into you by way of semi-interactive unskippable cutscenes, which simply overwhelmed me under a deluge of information, losing my interest.
As much fun as I had wasting time hopping around rooftops, I found myself craving a dialogue system and NPCs to talk to. I wanted to collect information, put puzzle pieces together, discover some illuminating things about the politics of the 1191 Holy Land that would make things click. I admit to being a bit dismayed that, for me at least, the bulk of the story is in the future with Abstergo and in the end the bulk of the gameplay as Altair became irrelevant once you had located the information Abstergo wanted. I suppose if this is the first in a trilogy of games, and each is set in a different locale, it's not as big of a deal.
In the end, I suppose what I'm saying is this. Fewer minigames - instead, let me talk to people. Interactive storytelling would help this game immensely. I would have felt like even more of a badass if Altair's boss had simply told him to go do the job, but I went hopping around the rooftops of Damascus or Jerusalem, collecting information and unraveling plots that I wasn't supposed to be. And this would have fit with the game's plot, even.
The game is breathtaking visually, but I felt like it reminded me a bit too often that I was actually playing a game. Story-wise, I'm excited to see where they take the arc dealing with Desmond and Abstergo.
I'd intended my next post to be about Bungie's other set of games that ate up a huge portion of my life with their modding potential back in the day, but I just finished playing Assassin's Creed for the PC, and I figure it's worth talking about while the game is still fresh.
My impression of the general reactions to this game is that there seem to be a lot of people hating it just because they can. Even from friends of mine, I've heard complaints about how "stupid" the sci-fi future Abstergo portions of the game are, and that it should have just been made as a game set in Altair's time.
Personally, I loved the game. It doesn't do everything perfectly, for sure. Bad things out of the way first. I realize that with the whole sandboxed open-world thing, it's good to give players something to do, small objectives to accomplish within that free range setting, and I endorse that. But some of the "investigations" you have to do are silly and not fun at all. Flag collection while under a timer? If you miss just one, you're pretty well screwed. That challenge isn't fun, it's just annoying. Pickpocketing missions can be cool, but towards the end the places they're set in just make things more frustrating - guards who'll let your target pass but not you, lepers who shove you and break your cover, failing the mission, and so on and so forth. Combat gets really repetitive and frustrating. I found it annoying and lacking in credibility that everybody in this world seems able to do the same parkour stunts that I can. The last half hour or so of gameplay is frustrating and really just a whole shitload of combat, which is something that I've established needs to be interspersed with other stuff to be any fun. And perhaps the biggest "WTF?" moment I had was when I realized that, as a deadly, highly trained assassin who can run and leap across rooftops and climb up walls, I apparently never learned how to swim.
And somehow, all those things get mitigated mostly by the simple experience of playing the game, at least to me. Even with a frustrating, repetitive combat system, the game does a good enough job making me feel like a badass that I just don't mind. The designers seemed to have lost sight of the point of their game at some point, which is of course the assassinations. I loved the rush of chasing down a target as he flees in complete terror, and leaping onto his back, driving my hidden blade home through his throat, but all the planning, the information gleaned from investigations, came down to nothing in the end as I broke out in a run towards the target and everything burst into chaos. I suppose that it was up to ME more than anything to compose an elegant plan and execute it flawlessly, though.
The story (which HEY HO is the point of my blog, here) is great, in my opinion. Though there are quite a lot of historical inaccuracies, it's frankly awesome to see a game set in this time period. It's funny that with all of recorded human history, most games just take place in medieval fantasy or sci-fi space settings. I think this time period is something that hasn't been touched on much.
The pseudoscience about DNA memory and the Animus I completely bought - I love neat ideas like that, and I thought it was pulled off quite well. I didn't have any problems with the game-within-a-game, and the real setting being in the near future. A large portion of the story for that part of the game is conveyed through the emails stored on the computers, and this text-based revelation is something that I'm a big fan of. Also, there are references to some occult and other paranormal artifacts and incidents in mankind's history that I personally found compelling.
The story within the Animus with Altair is rather less headgamey, with an unfortunately predictable twist and what I felt to be a blatantly obvious mechanic to force the player to learn the ropes while keeping Altair's character seasoned and experienced. Each assassination target, when killed, leaps into a soliloquy about his motives and his perspective on what he's doing, but I never really felt the connections they had to each other and the significance that they held as targets. The whole plot of the game was overshadowed by the actual gameplay experience in town, and your investigations don't help uncover anything of significance except for ways to eliminate your target. The story that is there is pumped into you by way of semi-interactive unskippable cutscenes, which simply overwhelmed me under a deluge of information, losing my interest.
As much fun as I had wasting time hopping around rooftops, I found myself craving a dialogue system and NPCs to talk to. I wanted to collect information, put puzzle pieces together, discover some illuminating things about the politics of the 1191 Holy Land that would make things click. I admit to being a bit dismayed that, for me at least, the bulk of the story is in the future with Abstergo and in the end the bulk of the gameplay as Altair became irrelevant once you had located the information Abstergo wanted. I suppose if this is the first in a trilogy of games, and each is set in a different locale, it's not as big of a deal.
In the end, I suppose what I'm saying is this. Fewer minigames - instead, let me talk to people. Interactive storytelling would help this game immensely. I would have felt like even more of a badass if Altair's boss had simply told him to go do the job, but I went hopping around the rooftops of Damascus or Jerusalem, collecting information and unraveling plots that I wasn't supposed to be. And this would have fit with the game's plot, even.
The game is breathtaking visually, but I felt like it reminded me a bit too often that I was actually playing a game. Story-wise, I'm excited to see where they take the arc dealing with Desmond and Abstergo.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
On Myth
Bungie Software is a company that I've been extremely conflicted about for quite some time now. Everyone knows them for Halo, sure, but nobody's aware that they ever made anything else. The fact is that they did, and those games are games that I've sunk more hours of my life into than any others. The Marathon trilogy and the Myth duology are the two that I'm the most invested in. Tonight I want to talk about Myth, partly because it's so dear to me and partly in keeping with the fantasy/medieval theme of World of Warcraft. Next time I'll dive into Marathon.
I'd played other RTS games in the past, namely Starcraft and Civilization, but Myth: The Fallen Lords grabbed me in a way that those others didn't. Resource gathering? None. You didn't build armies of units with the full expectation of losing some, and just throw them at some enemy targets. You had what you were given at the start of the level, occasionally you got reinforcements, but that wasn't anything to rely on. You had to position them wisely, plan ahead, and use the terrain to your advantage. Each one of your men were valuable.
The story was another aspect of Myth that captivated me. Each level opened with a journal entry, which is an ingenious mechanic to present a human element and a character to connect with in a game when you essentially see your characters as units looking all the same. Though you never definitively see the narrator ingame, you still follow him through the entire game, only a couple times does he write about events he wasn't present for. Though the writing in the journals is straightforward, with a great battlefield diary flavor to them, there are details that people have picked apart for years, trying to figure out all the nuances and backstory of the game which lie hidden. This isn't the same as World of Warcraft's sprawling, skippable world story - Myth tells a tale that's like Lord of the Rings crossed with Vietnam war fiction, grim and desperate. The larger questions about the workings of this world, the whereabouts of several of the Fallen Lords (sorcerer generals held in the main bad guy's thrall) and the earlier years of the war, go unanswered in the journal of a simple soldier. And yet, hints of these things make themselves known, whether in the journals as the narrator mentions in passing something he's heard, or in flavor text for the units.
The sequel Myth II: Soulblighter I felt to be a little bit thinner in terms of story, but it made up for it with some superb maps, and the release of the tools needed for one to make new maps, units, plugins, and just about anything one wanted, given the proficiency. My 2D art skills in Photoshop led me to creating the texture maps for new levels, spending many happy hours blending grass into dirt into sand into water into mud, trying to evoke the most convincing landscape possible when overlaid on the terrain mesh. I realize this isn't exactly story related, but modding for Myth led myself and many others within the community to write new stories, some set in the Myth universe, others entirely new, for our custom maps, units and scenarios to follow. Granted, I was rather young and most of the backstories I wrote when I was in Chemistry class don't look as good to me anymore as they once did, but it was the earliest and most intimate brush I had with the story element of video games.
I'd played other RTS games in the past, namely Starcraft and Civilization, but Myth: The Fallen Lords grabbed me in a way that those others didn't. Resource gathering? None. You didn't build armies of units with the full expectation of losing some, and just throw them at some enemy targets. You had what you were given at the start of the level, occasionally you got reinforcements, but that wasn't anything to rely on. You had to position them wisely, plan ahead, and use the terrain to your advantage. Each one of your men were valuable.
The story was another aspect of Myth that captivated me. Each level opened with a journal entry, which is an ingenious mechanic to present a human element and a character to connect with in a game when you essentially see your characters as units looking all the same. Though you never definitively see the narrator ingame, you still follow him through the entire game, only a couple times does he write about events he wasn't present for. Though the writing in the journals is straightforward, with a great battlefield diary flavor to them, there are details that people have picked apart for years, trying to figure out all the nuances and backstory of the game which lie hidden. This isn't the same as World of Warcraft's sprawling, skippable world story - Myth tells a tale that's like Lord of the Rings crossed with Vietnam war fiction, grim and desperate. The larger questions about the workings of this world, the whereabouts of several of the Fallen Lords (sorcerer generals held in the main bad guy's thrall) and the earlier years of the war, go unanswered in the journal of a simple soldier. And yet, hints of these things make themselves known, whether in the journals as the narrator mentions in passing something he's heard, or in flavor text for the units.
The sequel Myth II: Soulblighter I felt to be a little bit thinner in terms of story, but it made up for it with some superb maps, and the release of the tools needed for one to make new maps, units, plugins, and just about anything one wanted, given the proficiency. My 2D art skills in Photoshop led me to creating the texture maps for new levels, spending many happy hours blending grass into dirt into sand into water into mud, trying to evoke the most convincing landscape possible when overlaid on the terrain mesh. I realize this isn't exactly story related, but modding for Myth led myself and many others within the community to write new stories, some set in the Myth universe, others entirely new, for our custom maps, units and scenarios to follow. Granted, I was rather young and most of the backstories I wrote when I was in Chemistry class don't look as good to me anymore as they once did, but it was the earliest and most intimate brush I had with the story element of video games.
Related links
http://myth.bungie.org/ - The place for anything Myth, really. The Asylum used to be a huge center of discussion about the story, but it's pretty dead these days. Still, all the journals and everything are there.
Friday, March 28, 2008
On World of Warcraft
So a month or two ago, I started playing World of Warcraft again. I'd played before in the two open betas, and then sometime in early 2007 when a friend sent me a 10-day trial invite, which I used up without getting the actual game. That same friend gave me another 10 days, and through some tortured reasoning in my feverish mind, I decided to get the actual game. It's changed a lot since the beta days.
One thing I notice about it, though, is the accessibility of it, even to people who've never played the Warcraft series of games (I'm guilty of that, yes). It's interesting how much it hints at this massive backstory beneath the world, but in the process of running up to an NPC and blindly hitting "accept" when they offer you a quest - which happens often due to every denizen of Azeroth needing your help - all that backstory gets lost. PvPers don't care about lore, and even players who stop to read the quest text and read the books lying about the world only get small snatches of the story that's going on. And it's such a sprawling, overgrown, convoluted story. Massive wars and heroes turned villains and corrupted magic and redemption litter every corner of the world. Hell, even cougars drop rare magical items sometimes. I've stayed up late reading the WoW Wiki, partly because of my nasty habit of getting fascinated with Wikis and clicking link after link after link, and I'm getting a sense of the Warcraft universe's story. And it's ginormous.
I imagine that Blizzard has done this to ensure that no matter what level you're at, every part of the world has something interesting about it, and has a sense of history. But how well does it work? Regions are more strongly defined in-game by their look and feel, as is the game itself. That's more a product of art direction than any writing. (In fact, it's due to this sense of atmosphere and feeling that I've said in the past I'd rather see a Diablo MMORPG from Blizzard than a Warcraft one.) The quests you go on, of course, were written by someone, and they're usually bookended by text or scripted dialogue involving NPCs, but the bulk of quests is killing things, which is the point of the game.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that WoW is a paradox. At the same time, the game is too big for the story, and the story is too big for the game. Reading it out of a game context, it makes me feel like I'm reading about the world of something like Lord of the Rings. Which isn't in and of itself bad; but in this case it's as if everyone has a copy of Lord of the Rings but isn't reading it, using it instead to bap each other over the head and yell "LOL N00B LERN 2 REED!"
My analogy starts to break down after this point, but you get my meaning.
At the same time, there's so much to do in-game, especially with whole ranks of people who only play for PvP, that the story falls by the wayside. I've seen one person say "Blood Elf lore makes me vomit," but that doesn't deter them from playing one bit. Story is incidental to enjoyment of the game, though the skeleton of it is there if the player wants to see it. But even in a world so large, there's too much story to fit into the game and still present to the player.
I have no idea how much of the bloated, twisting, convoluted story behind the Warcraft universe was actually imbued in the RTS series of games and how much has been added in order to function within the World of Warcraft gameworld. And I'm not saying it's really a bad thing. If I were designing an MMORPG that wasn't based off an existing lore, however, I would start with what framework of story was needed ingame, hinting at a greater story underneath to give a sense of depth. Ideally, as content changed and expanded, more story would be added with it, and the world would change and evolve in some ways, including new story-driven alterations to regions players had seen before, giving some incentive to go back and removing some of the monotony of a huge, sprawling, unchanging landscape like World of Warcraft.
In the end, however, I'm not convinced that the MMORPG is a format of game that really relies on story. A regular RPG certainly does, but once you add the MMO aspect to it, the model almost seems to break down.
One thing I notice about it, though, is the accessibility of it, even to people who've never played the Warcraft series of games (I'm guilty of that, yes). It's interesting how much it hints at this massive backstory beneath the world, but in the process of running up to an NPC and blindly hitting "accept" when they offer you a quest - which happens often due to every denizen of Azeroth needing your help - all that backstory gets lost. PvPers don't care about lore, and even players who stop to read the quest text and read the books lying about the world only get small snatches of the story that's going on. And it's such a sprawling, overgrown, convoluted story. Massive wars and heroes turned villains and corrupted magic and redemption litter every corner of the world. Hell, even cougars drop rare magical items sometimes. I've stayed up late reading the WoW Wiki, partly because of my nasty habit of getting fascinated with Wikis and clicking link after link after link, and I'm getting a sense of the Warcraft universe's story. And it's ginormous.
I imagine that Blizzard has done this to ensure that no matter what level you're at, every part of the world has something interesting about it, and has a sense of history. But how well does it work? Regions are more strongly defined in-game by their look and feel, as is the game itself. That's more a product of art direction than any writing. (In fact, it's due to this sense of atmosphere and feeling that I've said in the past I'd rather see a Diablo MMORPG from Blizzard than a Warcraft one.) The quests you go on, of course, were written by someone, and they're usually bookended by text or scripted dialogue involving NPCs, but the bulk of quests is killing things, which is the point of the game.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that WoW is a paradox. At the same time, the game is too big for the story, and the story is too big for the game. Reading it out of a game context, it makes me feel like I'm reading about the world of something like Lord of the Rings. Which isn't in and of itself bad; but in this case it's as if everyone has a copy of Lord of the Rings but isn't reading it, using it instead to bap each other over the head and yell "LOL N00B LERN 2 REED!"
My analogy starts to break down after this point, but you get my meaning.
At the same time, there's so much to do in-game, especially with whole ranks of people who only play for PvP, that the story falls by the wayside. I've seen one person say "Blood Elf lore makes me vomit," but that doesn't deter them from playing one bit. Story is incidental to enjoyment of the game, though the skeleton of it is there if the player wants to see it. But even in a world so large, there's too much story to fit into the game and still present to the player.
I have no idea how much of the bloated, twisting, convoluted story behind the Warcraft universe was actually imbued in the RTS series of games and how much has been added in order to function within the World of Warcraft gameworld. And I'm not saying it's really a bad thing. If I were designing an MMORPG that wasn't based off an existing lore, however, I would start with what framework of story was needed ingame, hinting at a greater story underneath to give a sense of depth. Ideally, as content changed and expanded, more story would be added with it, and the world would change and evolve in some ways, including new story-driven alterations to regions players had seen before, giving some incentive to go back and removing some of the monotony of a huge, sprawling, unchanging landscape like World of Warcraft.
In the end, however, I'm not convinced that the MMORPG is a format of game that really relies on story. A regular RPG certainly does, but once you add the MMO aspect to it, the model almost seems to break down.
Mission Statement
So, I'm a writer. Maybe not the best writer ever to exist, but I pride myself on having a way with words.
One of the potential jobs that I'm interested in is writing for videogames. Naturally, the videogame industry isn't the easiest to break into - it probably takes magnificent feats on the order of something that might actually be depicted in a videogame. But I think a good place to start is to write about videogames, and especially on their stories and the role of writing in them, as well as the plotlines for game concepts I've had myself.
If I do that, then eventually it's possible that will morph into writing for videogames as well, isn't it?
One of the potential jobs that I'm interested in is writing for videogames. Naturally, the videogame industry isn't the easiest to break into - it probably takes magnificent feats on the order of something that might actually be depicted in a videogame. But I think a good place to start is to write about videogames, and especially on their stories and the role of writing in them, as well as the plotlines for game concepts I've had myself.
If I do that, then eventually it's possible that will morph into writing for videogames as well, isn't it?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)