Survive today to (maybe) fight tomorrow

As my Fallout 4 playthrough goes on, more thoughts accumulate on the back of my mind.

There is one, especially, that I wanted to express & explore, and it is about Survival Mode.

Since Fallout 3 I always tried to play these games with the Survival Mode activated, because it gave me a better feeling of tough life in the post-atomic wasteland. The whole experience changes in many ways, forcing the player to pay attention to hunger, thirst, and other needs. It gives more importance to some items that, otherwise, would be just scrap stuff, like drugs or crafting materials required to create precious antibiotics.

Without Survival Mode elements, Fallout to me is kinda boring. I love the lore, and the gameplay is fantastic nevertheless. However, the lack of survival elements cracks open the fourth wall, disrupting the suspension of disbelief and reducing all my actions to pure mechanic redundancy. While noticing this, I also realized that Survival Mode contextualizes a dynamic familiar to many, many open-world games, namely procrastination.

‘scuse me sir, do you have time to talk about our lord and savior, Beefus?

How many times you found yourself gathering ten herbs for a random guy, in order to complete a secondary mission (and therefore grind to higher levels) completely ignoring, like, a world to be saved? Let’s take Final Fantasy XV as an example: at some point Noctis has to reach a really important place, and you know it’s super urgent. But you stop nonetheless the Regalia next to a juicy enemy and beat the crap out of it, because there is a hunting subquest to achieve.

Survival Mode forces you to stop, and help the random guy or kill the juicy enemy: you either need to trade something the guy has, to save yourself, or the juicy enemy drops some very good meat. So the whole playthrough goes on, (necessary) secondary adventure after secondary adventure, kinda coherent and credible. The way I like it.

Agdy days

These are odd days.

Lately I am facing a lot of “trolley problems” in either personal life, work life, or other situations where I either do nothing and watch things become a mess, or I do something and cause a slighter (maybe more manageable) mess. In any case it appears I cannot be satisfied by the choice I make, which is kinda frustrating. The funny side of the story, though, is that this happens also when I play games.

Let’s take Fallout 4 as an example: after Bethesda announced Fallout 76 I was so hyped that I picked the fourth up again, since I never completed the main story and wanted to see where it goes. Among the reasons that led me to abandon it in the first place there was my character, a guy somewhere in between Rambo and the lone wanderer seen in Fallout 3. It was so shallow that I lost interest in it, so this time I made an extra effort to build a very specialized character that could be interesting from start to finish.

My first attempt was a heavy weapon expert specialized in power armors. The guy goes by the name of Connor, and walks around with a machine gun, always wearing his customized armor. It worked, especially considering I’m playing in Survival Mode, but at some point I realized there was potential for something different…hence I restarted the game.

The second try was a ninja named Kisuke: stealthy dude who lurks in the shadows, waiting for the right chance to strike. While the idea looked bright and amazing on paper, playing such a character within Survival Mode is a nightmare (or at least it is for me). Enemies spot you too easily, and I noticed that the Ninja perk (which should multiply 4x any stealth melee damage) does not trigger all the times for some reason. So I was always entering gunfights with a knife. How about nope.

At that point I had another choice to make: restart the game again with another build (I have many in mind: the beastmaster, the scientist, the leader), or just stay with what I had and go on. This time I choose the latter. Playing as Connor might not be so very particular, but it is better than entering an endless loop of dissatisfaction. And I’m starting to get attached to it, after all.

Zombie 3

The other day I finally completed The Evil Within. It has been a harsh playtrough, to say the least: aside the swearing and all my usual grumbling, I must admit that it is a really solid game. Although it implements some major design choices that I cannot tolerate, as you could read (here and here), my final impression is positive. Not sure if I’m going to play the sequel, tho. The setting/lore did not pull me in at all, and I’m afraid the it would be a very “more of the same” situation for which I have zero interest at the moment.

This is a problem I have with games (and books, and movies): if the setting is not to my taste, I tend to avoid it; on the contrary, if I like the setting, I can overlook all the kind of flaws. For example, I am not interested in the Witcher franchise. At all. Maybe The Witcher 3 is the greatest game of all time (as I heard many times), but…meh. I mean, okay. That’s cool, but none of my business. Maybe one day I will force myself into playing it, just to observe why people is so enthusiastic about it. Maybe.

However, I could play Fallout: New Vegas and the whole Dishonored saga anytime, many times in a row. It already happened, actually. While some of my friends complain about every little bug that is in those games, I simply don’t care: the feeling of lurking into a lore that I like is so overwhelming that anything else fades in the background.

To me, there’s a power in world building, in creating a compelling narrative universe that makes me wonder “what’s next?” “what happened here?” and so on, that other design elements cannot reach.

I guess it’s just a matter of personal attitude. After all, I’m also a super fan of the Riddick universe. Nuff said.

Zombie 2

Since yesterday’s rant was not specific enough, here’s some more arguing against The Evil Within design choices.

Today I faced a bossfight that begun right after a cutscene. As soon as the fight starts, the playable character has no ways to escape and embraces his weapons; to me, this appears as a clear hint for the player: it says “You must stay there and fight”.

However, shooting at this huge monster has little, or no effect at all. At some point NPCs yell some directions that could drive your attention to the real threats or, rather, to the threats you should face in order to progress into the game. Sadly enough these directions are not clear, perhaps because Italian localization changed them a bit, or they are just too vague, and while the player tries to figure them out, the mega boss swings its arms to kill the protagonist.

Then you are forced to restart the battle, and watch the cutscene (which you cannot skip completely) all over again. This happens on a loop until you figure out precisely how to move, what to do, etc.

Now, I like this “puzzle-solving” attitude applied to bossfights, when there is a pattern to discover or a way out to find. I really do. But forcing the player to watch over and over again a cutscene in preparation for the fight is kinda boring, frustrating. It works against the flow of a satisfying gameplay.

Zombie

At some point, while playing Tango Gameworks‘ The Evil Within, you will eventually find some corpses that aren’t quite as dead as they look. They are actually not dead enough, so you – a very good Samaritan – need to help them to stay put. Some of them will try and get up again and again (and again), as all good zombies do. Because they refuse to surrender, always trying to evade death (like this blog of mine, for example).

It feels like it’s time for me to do my thing – writing – again, in any possible way. In the last few weeks I typed lots of words one after the other so that they made sense, forming stories. But I missed writing about games, and here we are once again.

Contain your enthusiasm, mate

So. The Evil Within.

I’ve been waiting to play this game since it was announced, but [things] happened and I was able to get my hands on it just lately. At first it reminded me the old Resident Evil games: its third-person gameplay with vintage mechanics quickly got me excited. However, as I adventured deeper into this hallucinating (and very well written) horror, I started to swear a lot. Not surprising anyone here, but this game is very hard sometimes. Very hard.

Not just because designers were able to put challenges into it, no: it appears that there are some buggy mechanics, or design flaws, intentionally left there to increase the game’s difficulty. For example, aiming with a pistol could be really frustrating due to the fact that a shot could miss the target even if it was perfectly centered in the HUD’s gunsight. Then you have boss fights: in order to understand what to do, or just do it right, sometimes you need to play a long session four, five, or six times in a row before finally advancing. Not to mention glitches, buggy hitboxes and all the kind of stuff. Result: hours and hours of frustrating gameplay.

This kind of approach to game design just makes me sad. Seriously devs, don’t be like this. I want to play your game, which i like very much, so let me just learn from my errors and get better (> INB4 GIT GUD FAM), do not frustrate me with ruthless enemies, rusty mechanics or frustrating bugs.

Ok? Thanks.

Shadow of Decency

Sometimes we make mistakes and we know it. We recognize them since they are just newborn thoughts in our minds.

My last calculated fault goes by the title of Middle Earth: Shadow of War. I was well aware that playing that game would have resulted in a huge disappointment, but did this stop me from buying it? No it didn’t.

WARNING – the following post includes major spoilers

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I would love to annoy you with the countless tales of hatred, betrayal, and unexpected friendship involving procedurally-generated orcs. Hoshgrish, Pushkrimp, Golm…names that will forever (i.e. – for the next month or two) remind me of some epic adventures. The Nemesis System in its 2.0 format is a masterpiece: it works, like it or not, and it sustains the game all alone while allowing emerging narratives to pop up like beautiful flowers in a fertilized field.

Unfortunately, that is problem number 1: any of those narratives is WAY better than the scripted storyline.

Shadow of War takes place once again in Mordor, right after the events of its predecessor. Talion and Celebrimbor are still bonded by ancient magic, as resolute as ever to dethrone the Dark Lord from his comfy seat in Barad-dûr’s attic. Plan A is to forge a new, purer Ring (lolwut.jpg), use it to subdue an army of orcs, and then declare war to Mordor. However, in the first ten minutes of the game Shelob (remember the giant-ass spider that almost killed Frodo in the movies? Well, forget it; she is some good looking lady now BECAUSE OF REASONS) pops up and takes the Second One Ring for herself. Which would be it. One of the evilest and most powerful creatures of Middle Earth has the equivalent of a mass murdering weapon. It’s done. Game Over. So long for Plan A.

But NO! She is kinda good now. You help her for a while, then she gives back the Ring, aaand…there you go again messing with poor orcs’ minds.

This is just an example for the long series of nonsensical situations in which the protagonists find themselves during the game.

So it comes problem number 2: scripted narrative has no internal consistency at all.

As a LOTR fan, Shadow of War bugged me deeply. It already happened with Shadow of Mordor, when the narrative went totally nuts and became a delirious megalomania, allowing the protagonist to confront Sauron (!) directly. This time, however, it appears that writers had more creative space to experiment with, and despite their good efforts they achieved some remarkable failure: the plot seems a fan fiction written by a teenager during a very hard acid trip. Word.

1V1 ME BRO

I wrote a list of every single plot point that bothered me; its length was scary, so I will stick to one point only: the whole War in the title has been never mentioned in any of Tolkien’s works nor adaptations. Yes, it could be argued that this whole saga is an adaptation on its own, with its rules and canons. But since it uses licenses (and designs) from Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies, all of this nonsense makes the two “Shadow of” simply inconsistent with the fictional universe in which they take place. Which is a more serious issue than it would seem, because:

[…] when a player starts to play a game in which he enacts an avatar character, he agrees to play the role that goes with the character. It’s up to the designer to decide how strictly that role is defined. Superman, for example, has no moral freedom at all; a player who wishes to enact Superman signs up to Superman’s moral constraints. (Adams, 2013)

In Shadow of War, the player enacts an avatar character (created ad hoc for the game) that should have very limited influence in interfering with the original story narrated in the LOTR saga. Nevertheless designers decided to disregard that in order to give the player a more relevant role in the fictional world, most likely with the sole purpose of entertaining their customers, hence getting a wider consent and – I would dare to say – sell more copies. In fact, the whole narrative is a mixture of fan-service tropes and overused cliches.

And this leads us – last but not least – to problem number 3: ending, grinding, and microtransacting.

You probably already heard about Act IV, a redundant series of missions required to see the game’s ending (and upsetting) cinematic. Hours over hours of repetitive actions that allow the player to get better equipment and stronger orcs – basically, grinding at its worst. I get that the design of this act represents decades of endless war between Talion’s army and Sauron’s, but the result is just a tedious waste of time that breaks the already messy narrative flow in a very bad way. To exacerbate the whole thing, there are the infamous microtransactions: if the player spends enough money on loot chests, he can skip through this long dullness just acquiring the strongest orcs. No further comment required.

Obviously if you can do that, it does not necessarily mean that you have to. However, the design choices clearly push to persuade the player into buying a chest or two. Frustration is a powerful weapon these days, as there are so many games to play and each one of us has so little time to enjoy them.

I truly hope that the guys at Monolith learn from their recent mistakes. The Nemesis System has to shine again, yet very far from wasted licenses, senseless grinding, and awful money-grabbing.

References

– Adams, Ernest (2013). Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers, Resolved, Gamasutra.com (http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/118_Three_Problems_Resolved/118_three_problems_resolved.htm) Retrieved: 11/16/2017

Always take the shot (once)

Sometimes it just feels so weird to write about stuff that just happened, but I guess it would be even weirder if I kept my thoughts all for myself. Everyone has its own ways to express feelings, reflections, and such. Writing is how I do it.

A few moments ago I finished my first, and only, run of Life is Strange. I’m stating this because, as for many other games, I will not go through it ever again. “Is it *that* awful, then?” you might ask. On the contrary, it has been a fiery rollercoaster of feels, a true masterpiece. It has been so good, with all the choices I made and, oh!,  all the consequences, that I feel like traversing it again would not be fair. It would ruin my memories, alter the emotions and overall experience I enjoyed while playing it for the first time.

Look at all those FEELS, framed forever

It’s a broader issue, tho.

This could be considered the second chapter in my personal crusade against replayability. Fact is: interacting with the game in that time and space created for me what has been defined an alterbiography (Calleja, 2009). It built a set of specific emotions, reactions, thoughts, and interpretations of what was happening. Like a framed picture that cannot be erased, with all its good and bad memories. Playing it again would be problematic.

First, in that case I would create another alterbiography that would overlap with the previous one, different from the original. As alternate realities that merge together creating a greater mess. I would confuse memories, too. This happens a lot when I see a movie adaptation of a book, for example: circumstances, actions and characters overlap a lot in my mind.

Second, my choices would be conditioned by what I know about the game’s scripted narrative and mechanics. So instead of roleplaying, or selecting choices following a precise path through a fictional opera, I would try and merely exploit the game (as a mechanic object, an artifact).

Third, I cannot even imagine how much the value of what I felt could fall if I engaged the game again. This is kinda related to that time when I complained about death in Tides of Numenera.

So the question here is: do we really need to traverse certain games (or part of them) more than once? Do they need to be traversed again, in order to be good? Why would we do that? To get a trophy, a reward, the personal satisfaction for “100%” a game? To see all the possible choices? Why don’t we, instead, simply appreciate what we experienced just once? And look back at it, maybe smiling sadly, like we often do with photos.

The obvious answer to all this is “do whatever you want” – as in, it probably depends on how every single individual approaches the media.

However, I uninstalled the game right away. Didn’t want to fight the temptation to ruin its greatness by playing it again.

But you (all of you) should definitely give it a try.

Just once.

References

– Calleja, Gordon (2009). Experiential Narrative in Game Environments, DIGRA

Everything is (not) under control

What better chance there is to get back to write (about games) than a damn rant? Exactly: none.

So here I go and spend some words just for a personal vent.

Today I re-started Never Alone, a platform imbued with Inuit culture, that is a masterpiece in the field of cultural heritage representation on digital media. Which means that the game is all about you discovering a foreign culture through play, in a nice, emotional, powerful, and meaningful way. It is an important game to me, as I tried to achieve the same goal with a project, learning (the hard way) how difficult this could be.

However, as beautiful and mind-blowing this game is, it grinds my gears nevertheless.

IT DOES

The reason is simple: controls are difficult and sometimes counterintuitive. Not all of them, yet enough to become annoying in certain moments of the game. It is the same situation I found myself into when playing The Last Guardian: all is beautiful, deep, and spectacular, but then you find yourself swearing because things went wrong when they should have gone right. Not to mention any FIFA.

So let me be really straight about this: controls, in video games, are not important.

They are fundamental.

We are talking about artifacts that, for their very nature, require some kind of input from the user to properly function. There is a lot to be argued around this topic, but I believe that what I mean is common ground for many of us. Ok, sometimes the input from the player can be scheduled and automated, or received from uncommon hardware (did someone say BANANAS?), but remains a fundamental component of this medium.

Then what happens when a player is unable to send the desired input to the game? It just does not work. The experience becomes frustrating, and that frustration distracts the player from other stuff. In Never Alone’s case, an enraged player pays less attention to the message that the game tries to convey. He disregards the informative videos or, in the worst scenario, uninstalls the game. Losing an opportunity to learn something new, while the game lost the chance to teach that something.

>inb4 “But Dark Souls has major control flaws as well!”
>”[any Behtesda-related comment]”
>”Just git gud fam.”

Jokes apart, I think this is a serious matter, too often underestimated. When designing a game, it should be very important to be sure that the control scheme works properly or else the risk is to make something that no one would ever play. Or enjoy. Or even understand.

Operation nostalgia 64

Since when I lost my Nintendo 64 in that dungeon we have as garage, I have been sad.

But one day Playtonic Games announced their Kickstarter campaign to fund a 3D platformer called Yooka-Laylee. Giving me hope. They did not try to hide the fact that it would have been an operation nostalgia for N64 enthusiasts. Nothing more, nothing less than a “spiritual successor” to Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie. As a fan of that mentally challenged bear (and his abusive companion bird), I believed in Playtonic’s project since the beginning and pledged my reward – a digital copy of the game – at day one. Crowdfunding went very well, and finally Yooka-Laylee is here in all its splendor.

Am I happy? HELL YES.

Does it meet the expectations? Maybe too much.

Has it major design problems? Of course.

I’m reading a lot of conflicting opinions these days. Some people is reacting with incredible enthusiasm, some other people is not – and I believe that both parties have their good reasons. For example, I have read a very interesting article regarding Yooka-Laylee’s level design flaws compared to other 3D platformers of the past (especially Banjo-Kazooie, the #1 comparison meter in this case). I agree, to some extent: Yooka-Laylee does not bring anything new to the genre, nor reflects the greatness of certain old glories.

Good ol’ times…oh wait!

However, I also think that Playtonic’s game is a great (huge!) success in what it does: delivering a specific experience straight outta the ‘9os, with all its pros and cons. Ok, it does not represent a paradigm shift, but that’s an acceptable issue. Not every game should be innovative, genre-defining, or a masterpiece. Especially this, that did not even try, want, nor claim to do such a thing. To understand the value of Yooka-Laylee we should consider its purpose, and how the game achieves that purpose – that is, being a modern antique.

This is a concept that I have been pondering for a while, since when I got to play Breaking Bytes‘ Xydonia. Some developers nowadays try to replicate the play experiences from past games, crafting modern products that remind antique stuff. Just like brand-new furniture created using the materials, and sometimes the techniques, from a past era. Playtonic enforced the feeling of playing an old N64 game on new consoles by using design choices, both bad and good, from nearly two decades ago. Doing so, they created a product that emulates the features of antique games. And it does it very well, to be honest. Yooka-Laylee has everything from the vintage golden-era of 3D platformers, except it does not hide behind a veil of emotive conditioning: we don’t look at it with nostalgia-lenses, we see it as it is yet tend to compare it with its “competitors” from recent or remote past.

Of course, adopting design choices from the 1998 blindly – or rather, deliberately – has its downsides. And I’m not just talking about rusty gameplay, camera issues, oversimplified UI. Here is an insight by Ian Bogost as an example of what I mean:

https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/851905894317260800

In Yooka-Laylee there is way more than that. Almost every character I met in the game somehow displays a disturbing behavior. The fraudulent snake, the mass murdering mega-director, some sexually harassing plants, etc. I wonder when it stops being British humor and starts becoming an issue instead. We often associate violent games with abuse – GTA, Mortal Kombat, etc. – but rhetoric is not always related to portrayed gore. It can be hidden behind colorful worlds, smiling characters and a PEGI 3 logo as well.

This said, I am enjoying Playtonic’s first game a lot. It is my first chance to play with a N64 again, and I was starving for this kind of experience, with all its highs and downsides.

Uncharted: a rant’s end

A few days ago I posted a rant about the Uncharted series and how it, imho, is a little overrated due to certain serious issues. But probably “overrated” isn’t even the right word for this…let’s just say that sometimes critics, media and gamers have double standards. Some close an eye, or both, pretending to not see very annoying stuff (like when The Last Guardian was being universally acclaimed, for example), and I fail to tolerate this attitude.

It is implicit in my bad temper to deal in absolutes (like a true Sith Lord), however academia taught me to accept new points of view and change my thoughts when facing new evidence. Long story short, I went through the last chapter of Naughty Dog‘s adventurous saga and completed Uncharted 4 as well. Changing my perspective on the whole topic. A bit.

Let’s jump to the brave statements: I think that Uncharted 4 is great. It represents, more or less, the approach I was dreaming of in my last post. Aside its inner “more of the same” core, it indeed covers a lot of the nonsensical issues seen in the past.

Me, leaping to conclusions

The random armies of enemies are still there, better contextualized in the environment and plausible within the narrative scheme. Gunfights can be kinda avoided by a proper stealth approach, there are no more odd spawnings and the overall experience doesn’t necessarily stall due to shootings. Hitboxes are still an issue, as many among the tougher foes seem scripted to go down only after a defined amount of damage – ok, but when I hit a guy with an RPG missle and he loses his helmet it really rustles my jimmies. Then there’s also that detail of the protagonist being a mass murderer for hypothetical self defense, but I don’t wanna go too deep into thoughts today.

Staying on the surface, I can say  that exploration has a greater impact in the game, thanks to wider areas, better designed levels, etc. Almost all from start to finish tickled my sense of wonder, and not just because the goal this time was about pirates. Probably the recent graphics helped, probably I just submitted myself to a “stronger” suspension of disbelief (pls academia forgive me for I sinned). Dunno why, the whole experience was more intense to me than the sum of the previous three entries.

Also: [SPOILERS] when villains capture the protagonist they actually try to kill him. HALLELUJAH.

Level design, characterization, scripted narrative and gameplay are also the best to date in the series. Especially Neil Druckmann’s story is well implemented in the game and has a very good flow, bringing no real fresh air to the genre, but stimulating emotive responses in the player with great animations, dialogue, and interactions between the characters. As a scriptwriter/narrative designer wannabe, this sets for me an excellent example of “doing things well”.

Oh, and the soundtrack! The sfx’s! The Italian voice acting! I loved the whole audiovisual experience, with an emphasis on the “audio” part of it. What more can I say? “A thief’s end” amazed me in so many ways, and probably it is clear as day if you read my post until now. Unlike the first three chapters it didn’t make me feel as I “had to” progress, I just wanted to. That’s the difference I was talking about in my rant.

So yeah, probably we don’t need more Uncharted (especially like 1, 2 or 3). But I’d look forward to the next Naughty Dog games nevertheless.

They aren’t *that* bad at this gamedev thing.