It’s been a while since I wrote anything here and there are two reasons for that. First, this blog was mostly an experiment to prove to myself I could attract an audience, and I proved that to my own satisfaction. The more time I spent on the site, the more readers I got, and I learned how to tailor posts and subject matter to my audience, and how to write to attract a larger audience. So to that extent, the experiment was a success.
I did not and do not intend to stop blogging, however. Rather I’ve been sidetracked by two big projects, one of which is the second reason and very writing intensive.
I’ve written a fantasy novel. Fantasy, because like SF, it’s one of my genres. But it’s basically done now and in the last stages of revision before I start promoting it with its own website and seeking an editor or agent.
So that’s one reason no updates. Another is that a lot of my Geek Thinking has been aimed toward a kind of Grand Unified Theory of RPGs that follows up on my articles about Adventures in D&D. But I think I’d been giving my Video Game readers short shrift and so wanted to do some video game writing for a while. But I’ve been hesitant to write too much about video games, because it’s my chosen profession and you have to be careful what you say.
But screw that.
I rented the new Red Faction game on the recommendation of a friend and I found that, like him, it revitalized my interest in the Open World genre pioneered by GTA.I and a whole swath of really talented people worked on the Mercenaries series of Open World games. Many of those people are still there, but the experience left almost all of us with a bad taste in our mouths.
It’s easy, when you’ve had a really negative professional experience like that, to associate it with all many of factors that weren’t really to blame, and Red Faction showed me that it wasn’t the genre I was sick of, I really loved the Open World genre. I just hate the Mission Structure we seem stuck with.
There were a lot of things about Red Faction I liked. Even though the characters are modeled like the ‘roided-out thugs from Gears of War, they were human. They seemed more human in motivation than a lot of video game characters. Volition executes on the Reluctant Hero formula well. The main character actually has a sympathetic expression on his face. That had to be hard to achieve. He doesn’t walk around in the opening scenes with a “I’m a bad-ass” look on his face, he has a “Oh man what now? I just want to live in peace” look which is a lot more subtle and hard to do. At least in video games. Artists in other media don’t seem to have a problem in this department.
The destruction was great, and visceral. Games work best when they trick you into thinking you’re smarter than you actually are. When I’m Sam Fisher, I think I’m smart because I found a way to take down that guard without using my pistol. When in fact there was almost no way to fail regardless of what I tried. When I’m Gordon Freeman, I think I’m smart when I panic and run in a random direction that just happens to be where the Content lies. But in fact that was the ONLY way to go.
In Red Faction, I felt smart because I’d look at a building and guess at how it was constructed, where the best place to put a charge was. I could walk around inside the buildings and look to see which walls were supporting all the weight. I created my own challenge, my own minigame by seeing how few charges it took to blow up a building.
In fact, it was probably all illusory. It may not have mattered where I placed the charges.I loved the vehicle design in Red Faction, someone obviously had a lot of fun making sci-fi Tonka Toys for Mars. They were both futuristic and workmanlike. They seemed both fantastical and plausible. Reminded me a lot of Ron Cobb’s work.
The run-and-gun was solid, though not remarkable, and “solid” is still better than most of the GTA games. I still think Mercs1 has the best run-and-gun I’ve seen in an Open World game. Mercs2 suffered, I think, from the designers and gameplay programmers being far more segregated and specialized. The gameplay coders had a lot more influence on the design in M1 and it shows.
The problem I had with Red Faction, and it’s a problem with a lot of games like this, is the Mission Structure. Not its specific Mission Structure but the concept of mission structures in the abstract.
That there are mission goes without saying, doesn’t it? Players need clear objectives. They also need clear motivation. Mercs1 had the first, but lacked the second and as a result a common complaint was that players just followed the blip and often had no idea where they were going or why. In Mercs2, the story provided those answers but since the story boiled down in some critics eyes to “you get shot in the ass” I think a lot of players immediately tuned out. I do not blame them.
The problem with Missions is explaining them to the player. So far, the only solution people have found in these games is a massive infodump whereby you stand there and listen to someone speak in what is not actually English, but a highly specialized language only found in video games. Your character, typically, remains mute during this process, just like in real life. Failing a mission in Red Faction is a big deal because you have to go back to the mission giver and go through the whole process again.
I cannot stress this strongly enough. This is not fun. Sitting through a mission briefing even ONCE is not fun, and it’s not playing the game. I used to think we could trick the player by making it entertaining. Using movable typography and animated infographics to distract the player from the fact that he’s sitting through a PowerPoint Presentation.
Players want to play the game. Some of them may put up with other stuff, some of them may enjoy things like PowerPoint Presentations, but the only thing all players have in common is their desire to play. We, as developers, should consider it our mission to identify the play, and strip out everything that stands between it and the player. That’s not always possible, but I think we can do better.
I was really enjoying Red Faction until I failed a mission. I didn’t mind failing, I’d behaved foolishly and should have failed. But when I saw that I had to go all the way back to the mission giver AND sit through the briefing again, I turned the PS3 off and have not turned it on since. Writing this post has reminded me of why I liked it and I may pick it back up.
According to the info I saw from both Lucasarts and EA, the average gamer is in his mid 30′s. He has a job, he has disposable income and unlike the stereotypical teenaged gamer, he’s not a hostage to the game he buys because it was the only game he could afford this quarter. He has a lot of options. Not only the expensive, AAA titles like Red Faction, but also instant-gratification downloadable titles he can immediately begin playing with his friends.
Shadow Complex, one of the best games I’ve played this year, is burdened with completely unnecessary story and dialog, but it is otherwise extremely lean and as much fun as games three times the price. Hard for a game burdened with Red Faction’s mission structure to compete. At least with me.
So what’s the answer? Red Faction and Mercs and many other games use a Mission Structure where you must go to the mission hub, talk to someone, and sit through a PowerPoint Presentation.
Games like WoW use a Quest-based system that’s essentially a textual version of the Mission Structure. You talk to someone, read some text, and go on your mission. The difference being, often missions are exclusive. You can only be on one. Whereas you can accept many quests at once. And the quest system allows you to click on someone, immediately accept, and go back to playing. You trade context (“I have no idea what’s going on”) for minimal downtime outside the play experience.
I think we can do better. I’d like to see a Scenario-based system whereby you explore the world and discover something is happening in this location. Verbing. There’s something to see. If you watch, you will probably get an idea of what it is. Two factions fighting, someone trying to sneak in somewhere, someone hiding from someone, someone being brutalized or arrested.
That’s interesting because it’s something happening and something you can immediately interact with. If you talk to someone involved, you get a short…short…tête-à-tête with the NPC involved in what happens, and a quest in your log.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“I dunno man, someone went crazy inside the hospital and just started shooting.”
*bing* New Quest added to your log. Investigate the crazy dude in the hospital.
Look at that. Short, to the point, elegant, and plausible. No one talked like they knew they were in a video game and the player got what he needed without a slide show.
There may be games that do this, and I just don’t know it or didn’t notice it because I wasn’t paying attention at the time. I think games work best when you don’t even see the design choices. But I first remember seeing this idea pitched by my colleague Rob Lo when we were both working on Mercs. I don’t think I really understood what Rob was proposing from a ground-level “what is the player’s experience” or “how do we implement this” perspective, but I remember it being confusing to a lot of people. I think this is because we’ve taken the existing frameworks for granted for a long time.But I think this is the ideal content structure for the Open World. The Open World is all about going anywhere and dealing with what you find there. The whole concept of briefing rooms or mission hubs is completely antithetical to this.
I think we’ve yet to see some of the best work done in the genre, because everyone’s still reacting to GTA. I think Crackdown tried something like this, but it was nascent. I remember driving through several areas very quickly pursued by the bad guys and randomly accumulating missions I didn’t understand because I’d just passed some invisible barrier that presumed I was on foot and therefore had the time to figure out what was going on.
It was confusing, but at least it wasn’t a PowerPoint Presentation.
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