Oldschool Hard

Mass Effect 2: Obliterate your free time, in spaaaaaace!

This post at Kotaku piqued my interest, covering some issues similar to what I usually look at in this blog.

Taking a point from said post, Mass Effect 2 has been released, and it seems like the topic du jour in gaming circles. Am I playing it? Of course not. I’m still stuck (for want of a better word; it’s not a chore) in Dragon Age, and it sets my tightarse sense tingling when it comes to paying full price for a game more than once every 3 or 4 months. What was Bioware thinking, releasing these games so close together? And the tight release schedule doesn’t stop – there’s more Dragon Age DLC coming in March. It’s insane. I like RPGs but fuck, there’s a million-ish decent games coming out in any given year and adults have jobs and kids and families and shit like that. Of course, I have none of those, and I barely consider myself an adult with my lack of responsibility and all-round juvenile sense of humour, but it’s the principle, dammit.

As I’ve written about before, as a kid you get what you’re given on Christmas and your birthday, so an RPG is brilliant, if you’re into them – more bang for the buck. It’s one thing to play a game over and over until you can do it with your eyes closed, but to have the same amount of game time with fresh content the whole way? Brilliant! The love story didn’t last – I fell out of love with JRPGs a while back, when I realised they were just treading the same ground again and again. I’m not so disillusioned that I won’t play any JRPGs at all, I just won’t waste my time and money searching for obscure spin-offs involving Thug no. 3 from Shadow Hearts‘ (no doubt) riveting backstory.

This also gives me the positive side-effect of having more time to spend playing other games that aren’t quite so demanding on my time, although those are getting less and less. Yes, I realise the irony of a WoW player saying this, but games are often just too damn long. Generally it used to be that it was either RPGs or ‘sandbox’ games that would suck up your time like a Hoover, but it seems to be creeping into all sorts of genres. I understand that the current revenue model involves bleeding you dry: full-priced games, or better yet, the ‘collector’s edition’ (hint: anything ever labelled as a ‘collectable’ when released is unlikely to ever be so) with some plastic chintz at maximum price, with the supposed ‘value’ in the 20+ hours of gameplay you get in exchange.

To me, value is in the intensity and enjoyment of the experience. I didn’t feel ripped off by the 6-7 hours of Shadow Complex I played, nor in roughly the same amount of time in the first Modern Warfare single-player game, although that one was at a discount. The experience was finely-tuned and there was rarely a lack of action. So I propose a new game model, to replace the game lengths and prices that are steadily creeping upwards.

Value is not in a 25 hour game with hours of cutscenes. Instead, provide a 5-15 hour experience, tuned for maximum action/enjoyment, at roughly half the price games are available at now. Make multiplayer a seperate entity at a price that means the single player experience + the multiplayer experience are available at a price on par, or better yet, slightly below, what full games cost now. Have some single-player modules, essentially just like current DLC, available at launch. That way, people who really like the single-player game world can have more of it without having to pay for a multiplayer experience they won’t use, those who don’t have time to play through a massive game can get a tight experience at a good price, and multiplayer-only gamers can avoid paying for superfluous single-player content they’re just not particularly interested in. Everyone gets the parts of the game they want, the incentive to buy secondhand is lessened (and thus developers and publishers lose less money to the secondhand market) because games are cheaper, and with more time and money on their hands, people may actually buy more games. A pipe dream, I know, but one I hope to see, especially with the rise and rise of digital distribution. Perhaps it’s a case of ‘check back in 5 years’?

Picture from Platform Nation.

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Just pass 700 more of these challenges, and then we’ll let you drive a Camry.

I like the idea of a decent learning curve and gathering more things as a game goes on to face greater challenges. Pretty much everyone’s aware of the ‘gather boomerang, gather hookshot, get more life-hearts’ Zelda-type of progression, and I don’t have a problem with that. Being able to get uber-gear straight off (like you can in, for instance, Oblivion, if you know what you’re doing) doesn’t make the game present much of a challenge, and while it’s fun to absolutely destroy everything in your path, the novelty grows old pretty quickly.

Note, however, the concept of a ‘decent learning curve.’ If a game ramps up the difficulty level exponentially, and then won’t let you get any further unless you do what it wants, that’s not fun. Ridiculously hard side-challenges like Ruby and Emerald weapon in Final Fantasy VII, I have no problem with – they don’t affect the main game at all. But something like the Guitar Hero games – “Yeah, play through these songs you don’t like to get to songs you do. Jump through some hoops to get what you paid for”? Fuck that.

It’s especially awful in games like the Gran Turismo series: I can’t speak for everyone’s motivations, but what I buy those games for is to drive fast cars that I’ll never be able to afford to actually buy. Having to pass ridiculous licence challenges in boring cars to get to the good bits strikes me as being against the spirit of being a game. Boring, arbitrary challenges that you have to do to get to do other things are usually known as a job, and you at least get paid for those.

Don’t get me wrong, some people like these ‘challenges’ and see them as fun. A good friend of mine refused to buy Gran Turismo 4 until he had completed 100% of Gran Turismo 3. He talks proudly about how it took him 2 years before he could complete a lap in Grand Prix Legends, at a decent speed, without crashing. However, for the rest of us without an acquired brain injury or autism spectrum disorder, this sort of stuff is generally regarded as bullshit.

At least unlockable content doesn’t cost you any money beyond what you’ve already paid for a game. I’m not really against downloadable content if it adds to a game, but paying for stuff that’s almost essential strikes me as a special kind of stupid. For instance, I’m enjoying the few hours of Dragon Age: Origins I’ve played so far, and as the Bioware sucker that I am, I bought the ‘deluxe’ (aside: notice how almost everything is or has a version that’s ‘deluxe’ or ‘premium’, these days? To paraphrase The Incredibles: “When everything’s special, nothing is”) edition, which came with all the DLC included. I bet the people who bought the regular edition of the game weren’t especially pleased to find that the fix to a widely acknowledged inventory problem could only be downloaded as part of the Warden’s Keep DLC pack. Sure, you got extra content, but anything that’s a systems-fix needs to be available free.

That wasn’t DA:O‘s only DLC sin, either. The idea of leaving hooks in the game (“Will you help me free my dronkey? To help me, thou needst to [PAY EA SOME MONEY]“) that slap you in the face with your ‘missing’ paid DLC is against the whole idea of stepping into a game world, and especially of playing a role in an RPG. Then there’s content like the extra multiplayer maps in games like Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, not technically ‘essential’, but without them it can be very difficult to find a multiplayer game. I haven’t even touched the concept of ‘day-1′ DLC, like the ‘classic’ map pack in GoW 2, the pack-in extras in (again) DA:O, and the Saboteur ‘titty code’.

What I find perhaps most ridiculous, keeping in mind that at this stage it’s just a rumour, is the rumour of Modern Warfare 2 having ‘DLC’ locked on the retail disc. It’s one thing to jump through in-game hoops to access what you’ve paid for, another thing entirely to pay more money for things that were on the disc YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

But, you negative nancy who never has anything nice to say, my dear voices inside my head ask, what games do DLC right?

Burnout: Paradise is a great example – not only does it have a good unlockable learning curve and basically no ‘essential’ unlockables, Criterion keeps releasing new DLC for the game, with a mixture of free content, reasonably priced content, and vanity items that you can buy if you love the game, but have no effect on the gameplay if you don’t. Team Fortress 2 is another, always getting updated and added-to, for free. It can be done, the developers and publishers just have to have the will to do it.

Image from IGN.com

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Problems with new games: not enough floating skulls.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of my top 5 games of all time, Planescape: Torment. This game, following a trend among many of my top 25 games, never sold very many copies, but has almost universally excellent reviews. Admittedly, these are the same publications that called GTA IV ‘perfect’, so you can take that with a grain of salt if you like.

Unlike most Dungeons and Dragons games that are set in the elves ‘n’ dwarves high fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, Planescape: Torment, as the name suggests, is set relatively obscure multiverse of Planescape, where many different planes of existence meet, and the nature of multiple universes can be changed by particularly strong-willed individuals. The game revolves around you playing an immortal, in the sense that you can die and will rise again, not that you are unkillable. You forget the events of your previous lives upon reincarnation, and must wander the multiple planes of the setting to reclaim your memories, often coming across characters who have you at a disadvantage, knowing you, without you knowing them – and a lot of them are pissed off with you.

You can choose to work for a range of factions and with a range of characters you meet, although one character, Morte, a sarcastic floating skull, is with you the whole game, and picks up insults NPCs fling, later to use them against you. I might be easily impressed, but damn, a talking smartarse skull. Niiiiice. The multi-plane setting of the game universe means you come across all sorts of creatres, from demons to deities, although not any of the Forgotten Realms familiars (like elves ‘n’ dwarves).

The game starts with you waking in a morgue (like one of my other favourites, the SNES Shadowrun). Death is a central part of the plot, and often dying is the only way forward. This is a zero-sum resurrection – some poor bastard has to die to provide for you to live again. Through each death, you rely on other characters or notes you have tattooed on your body (yes, this came out pre-Memento) to work out who you are and what you need to do. There’s a line early on in a conversation, after you find the person who made you immortal, that really sums up with the game is about: ‘What can change the nature of a man?’ Without giving too much away, there’s a reason you were made immortal, and you have a notoriety throughout the planes. How you choose to deal with that directs where the game’s plot goes.

PC:T one of the most ‘adult’ games I’ve ever played, and not in the ‘titties and blood’ sense – there’s not a lot of combat, and quests are often better solved by careful thought and the right course in conversation, and there’s no one ‘right’ choice to solve any particular problem – no easy answers nor obvious immediate impact in the choices that you make. It’s one of the earliest RPGs that I can remember where the protagonist is not a font of virtue or a good man in a bad land, the choices you make influence both your character and plot greatly, and the experience is not diminished by choosing to be a ‘bad’ character.

Slow-paced, with combat like a retarded Baldur’s Gate, and mountains of text, it’s not a game for everyone, and I can see why it didn’t grab people browsing on a store shelf or reading reviews – it looks drab, brown and grey – and long existential conversations aren’t exactly everyone’s idea of a good time. That being said, it’s possibly Black Isle Studios’ crowning achievement, and that says a lot when you consider that they also developed the first two Fallout games and helped Bioware with the Baldur’s Gate series. Although showing it’s age now, particularly with a hard 640×480 resolution, if you can pick up a copy on eBay at a non-exorbitant rate, I highly recommend it.

Picture ripped from Gamespot. Yeah, I do that.

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This guy is why you can’t have nice things, Gears of War.

“HEY. YOU. FAT BOY. YEAH, YOU, CAPTAIN BALDING. You said you were gonna talk about the mistakes made by games, but it’s been four fucking posts and all you’ve done is waffle on about your unremarkable childhood and poor taste. Get with it, already.”

Alright, shaddap. The first common gaming mistake I’m going to tackle is mostly, but not exclusively, a problem with newer games. It’s one that’s been brought home to me as I play through Mass Effect again, procrastinating on getting to the game pile (aside: procrastinating on playing games, by playing a game you’ve already played, is that the absolute depths of sloth?) so I can refresh on Shepard’s world in anticipation for Mass Effect 2, and get in a Bioware mood for when my crappy download-limited Australian net connection rolls over to next month and I can download Dragon Age: Origins at a speed greater than 64kbps. Makes me a little misty-eyed, remembering that I put up with dial-up for more than 6 years past broadband’s introduction.

Oh, yeah, games. Right. I came to the part where you rescue Liara, at my leisurely sidequest-ing pace, about 8 hours into the game. Because I am terrible at both games and life, it took me about 5 attempts to beat that charging Krogan. Every frigging time having to make the same three or four choices. Again. And watch the dialogue. Again. While I could skip parts of the dialogue, I couldn’t skip the whole scene. And because after the scene you go directly into combat, I couldn’t save. So after I died again, I then had to make the same three…you get the idea.

(At this point I will say: I’m aware Negative Gamer, among others, talked about this first, but they talk about generalities, not specific games. Besides, I like Negative Gamer. They have a similar ethos to mine, but with actual talent.)

Now, one solution is to not suck so much, but most games (ie. not Ninja Gaiden 2 – which, incidentally, also had unskippable cutscenes) are supposed to cater for both the hardcore (you) and the terribad (me). Hell, you don’t even necessarily have to be in the game to have unskippable scenes, do you, Borderlands?. Not allowing me to skip the company logos that show up every time I start the game, not even after the first time I see them? Learn to play nice with others.

Again proving my terribad-ness, if I have to watch a helicopter flyover of General RAAM in Gears of War one more time, I think I’ll snap the disc. I beat the game, got my crappy 100 achievement points, and I doubt I’ll never put it back in the drive again. Too Human was another game which ‘punished’ you for dying by making you watch the elaborate half-minute death sequence over and over again. Not quite right in a game where you there’s no actual gameplay-based penalty for dying. I was already being punished by playing your good idea wrapped up in a crappy implementation, Silicon Knights, please don’t punish me any further. And I know there’s a heap more examples of this in gaming – this is only what I can reel off without having to actually tax my brain by trying to actively remember or my fingers by going past 750 words.

While older games didn’t necessarily have as many/any cutscenes, they tended to manifest the ‘unskippable’ problem in another way – inappropriate save points. One of my PS2 controllers still rattles from me hurling it to the floor, after about the 10th time of doing the half hour run from the last save point to Sin in Final Fantasy X, and watching as a Marlboro (or similar) again cast ‘Confuse’ on my whole party. What drove me to hurling the controller down was not my party dying, but having to SIT AND WATCH for 10 minutes while they killed each other before the game would give me the courtesy of a game over screen. At least the cutscenes were skippable in this one. And it’s a less nerd rage moment than a friend of mine who hurled an N64 controller through a wall. I can’t remember why, specifically, but I bet it had something to do with Oddjob in Goldeneye multiplayer…

Picture again shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. I still cropped it myself.

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