I liked Halo 3. I love Gears of War 2. But, is it just me or did these games both take a million years to come out with…absolutely nothing new.
Now I understand in the case of Halo 3. The previous Halo was on the Xbox, not the 360, so I’m sure a new engine had to be created. And yeah, the graphics were better. Very crisp and clean visuals. But the game play is pretty much exactly the same.
Gears of War 1(GoW1) was made on the Xbox 360, so Gears of War 2 (GoW2) and received a token graphical update but pretty much looks and plays like GoW1.
Now I get it. If you have a franchise that works and works well you don’t fuck with it. Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill have skirted the line of changing things around and both have been caught between various degrees of success and epic fail!
But what I don’t get is why it took so damn long for both Halo 3 and GoW2 to come out. Both games are, ridiculously short. I could have finished Halo 3 in a single day. GoW2 seems a bit longer but I think I could have had it beat in 2 days. Fortunately the online play gives both games considerable survivability. But I still can’t get my head around why it’ll take so long to construct these games.
I presume that level design is an important feature and takes a long time to make. I remember Doom 3, a FPS and the game was HUGE compared to these games. I suppose Doom 3 has a lot of endless corridors which help pad the levels considerably, but still, it took me weeks to almost finish that one. Dead Space took me only 13 hours to complete if the clock is to be believed but it took me days and days to finish because I had to move at a more careful pace and died a lot.
What I guess I find funny is that Halo and GoW are acclaimed for their storytelling. But…these are really basic stories. They are exciting in that you really like the main characters. Master Chief and Marcus are both tuff guys and you get into the role because these are just two soldiers who absolutely refuse to die (despite the fact that both really should have many times over). The Halo series is a very simply constructed story, at least after the first game. And the GoW series introduces so many little plot threads that never get explained, it comes across as sloppy writing rather than what I think that they are trying to do, which is, sell more games in the future with promises of explaining themselves. But I can’t help but think, if GoW had better storytelling in the first place, they wouldn’t need to tie up loose ends. Good storytelling makes a reader/player invested in the story in the first place.
To give an example of the frayed storytelling (look a metaphor, I think), you start GoW1 in the middle of the war. Without any explanation in game as to why this war is being fought. It just is. You look awful human to me, so we presume you are human…but who actually knows. It really wouldn’t be the first time a game tries to trick you. As you fight people talk about the Locust Invasion. You quickly learn, more through osmosis than clear storytelling, that this doesn’t mean that the crops are in trouble. The Locust are aliens. Okay, fine. You start fighting them and while some of them are yelling you realize that a) they are speaking English and b) they are using guns not unsimilar to your own. Is this a story thread? After two games, I don’t think it is but it could be. Oh and they are talking about cities that I’ve never heard of so I have to conclude, we aren’t on Earth.
Since this is all super confusing, maybe it’s time to pause the game and watch the intro movie for explanation. They talk about E Day (Emergence Day) on Sera (which is the planet), the day that the Locust first showed up. Now there is war. That’s about the entirety of the short, opening cut scene.
So you are thrust into GoW with a shaken understanding of what it is your exactly you’re fighting for other than to avoid extinction. It’s a very private tight story focused on Marcus and his squad of Gears (soldiers with cool armour and cooler weapons). And while they all remain a mixture of charming and dicks, you can immerse yourself in their individual plight but I found it extremely hard, from what the game delivered, to figure out the setting (seriously, why are the enemy speaking English). I mean sure, I should care about them not dying but I couldn’t figure out why, if these are humans, they can’t just abandon their planet on spaceships, since they must have used them to get on the planet in the first place. In fact, the Locust feature no space ships themselves making it…another unresolved plot thread.
Since the storytelling in GoW 2 isn’t very deep (although it’s very well acting, IMO) it’s a surprise to me that it took so long to put out. I’ve seen some screenshots between GoW1 and 2 and yeah, 2 looks a lot better. But GoW1 looked great. So I’m a bit disappointed that GoW 2 didn’t bother making their story better.
That being said, a big part of their story involved the secondary character, Dominic, where Marcus plays the role of witness to the tragedy going on in Dom’s life. That was a bit of a surprise although kinda refreshing. It’s a bold maneuver that I think pays off. If it happened to Marcus then you’ve got a character in which the world revolves around. So that was a very good touch.
Halo, storywise seems to have the opposite problem that GoW has. The first game was reasonably deep, with a story that was clear and concise. Halo 2 had an alright story that ending in a big screw you to the players. Halo 3 had a very vapid, forgettable story which had it seem like there wasn’t really a story at all. Something about the Death Star being rebuilt and somebody trying to use it. So I get that the time it took between Halo 2 and 3 was to port it over to the power of the 360 but you think they could have spent some time on the story. I don’t mind the story that they choose but the framework seemed weak. You are location A. You discover that you need to do C. Suddenly you’re at the location of B so it’s just a hop-skip and a jump to get to C and get your objective, where you find out that you need objective E. Suddenly, you’re at location D and it’s just a hop-skip and a jump to get to objective E. Wash, rinse, repeat and you’re done. It really seems that they could have done a better job with the story.
Fortunately for both games, you like the main characters. Marcus is seriously bad ass and has such a great emotive voice that you have to like him. If I were him I would have punched out one member of the Delta squad a long time ago, but Marcus is the leader and keeps professional. More than any of them, he keeps his eye on the ball. Nobody appointed him the protector of the human race, and he wouldn’t even admit it, but he’s the most focused to winning the war. Master Chief seemed more bad ass at the start when you find that you’re a cyborg and soldiers are cheering when you approach to help them fight but as the story goes on…I wonder…did anybody else think that he had the hots for that tiny woman A.I. that he was always saving? I mean, it’s kinda cool if they did something with it, unrequited love and all. Regardless, Master Chief is given the weight of the world because he’s a cyborg and thus, he can do things that others cannot. To me, that’s an entirely more believable synopsis than a single human soldier who can wade through bullets and being eaten twice (in GoW 2). But who cares cuz it’s just a game.
I cannot believe that Halo or GoW is done. So I will look forward to next time when both, I hope, have a better story to go along with all that intense high octane action.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
More Human Than Human (Drugs in Games)
Dice roll Modifiers: To reward players we heap on bonuses. To punish players we give them negatives. This is one of the reasons that drugs in games don’t often work.
Shadowrun was always a game of prissy elves and sterilized technology, so having cybernetics that always worked and having drugs that were entirely forgettable, was fine. Shadowrun is gritty-lite.
But Cyberpunk really tried to go for a much dirty game and therefore, I blame them entirely for these same failures.
Very quickly: cyberwear was much too clean in Cyberpunk. There was never a chance that it was installed poorly, that it could wear, that it could fail or screw up and become more of a problem that it was worth. It was always superior to have cyberwear over not having it. Cyberpunk’s mechanic to avoid too much tech was a fairly weak mechanic that would lower your Empathy and once it was gone, your character was a raving lunatic (and you lose your character). The mechanic is entirely weak because the player can roll their dice for how much of a loss they take and then judge whether or not their character can take more. Once the roll was done, there was never any adjusting it. Once I hide the character’s rolls but then, a player took too much cyberwear and I was stuck. They didn’t want any more stuff but I rolled and their character became a cyberpyscho and was done for. They were the central character. So what to do? In the end, I ultimately ignored it and told the player not to take any more cyberstuff and he was perfectly happy with that.
Games that try to go for the gritty seem to also lack any moral or ethical system. I guess in the grim future, it’s become perfectly acceptable to shoot low paid security guards in the face and be fine with it later. A good player may take it upon themselves to have a moment of feeling awful, but they’ll get over it (often forgotten about by the next session).
Because of a lack of moral/ethical rules or even rules for stress, a character has no need for things that we use everyday to counter stress. Everybody in this world has a way to escape their lives (many of us pretend that we’re other people). And so too should a good and layered character has those outs. Although a lot of players tend to rely on some arguable ‘weak’ methods of escape: “My character sure does love to clean. Yes sir, after a day of murdering security guards and getting nearly killed, there really isn’t anything I like better than going home and doing something entirely safe and without consequence.”
I’m not saying that every character needs to turn to drugs, but to get into the mindset of the character, living on the gritty streets of Night City, drugs would be everywhere and they would be cheap. All your friends are doing it. People look at you like you’re a damn narc if you don’t take. But most importantly, it fits with the genre that you’ve chosen to game within.
The problem isn’t the world or the genre. It’s the players and how drugs are handled in the game. Recreational drugs almost always give some trivial bonus to skills that won’t come up and give hefty negatives to skills that are important to the game (often combat skills). And of course, right after that, the player gets to read the addition difficulty value and most of them say ‘No dice. My character is living clean.”
Ignoring the fact that booze and smokes are actually addicting drugs (but they’re legal and hence cool and can’t harm anybody), unless the system has a mechanic that handles something as ephemeral as stress, there will never be a reason or a need for a character to take recreational drugs. Games like Cyperpunk try to promote heavy combat and in combat, things that give you the aforementioned negative modifiers, especially when they are optional to begin with.
I believe that hard lives demands hard play. Part of a great Cyberpunk journey, at least the books that started the genre, was about the human part, not the cyber. Sure for the RPG they introduced more corporate hiring of street mercs to pull local black ops, but they completely dropped the ball on making their gritty world…well gritty. The Cyberpunk RPG wasn’t a journey to watch your soul slip away due to cybernetics, bad moral choices, loosing people close to you or even losing yourself into the violent world of gangs and drugs. It was D&D with guns.
In order to make these things compelling, you have to make them compelling to the type of player who wants to play Cyberpunk. You then have to construct rules that say, if you sell this piece of your soul, you get this benefit. Then you have to have the negative be there, but not completely outweigh the benefit and still have some relevance to the game. Players, after all are nothing if not efficient. The street solo (fighter) is completely willing to sacrifice all their social skills to become the bestest killer evar. And it’s all the more apparent in an RPG, because often the player never has to deal with the character on a non-adventure level (heck, nobody would ever want to live the life of this bad-ass machine who goes home and sits on his bed, waiting in quiet until the next time he’s called…it would be boring in the extreme). And furthermore you have another play handle all that ‘sort of thing’. The ‘face’ of the group who gets the contracts and the like. And this is always handled poorly and always handled in true min-maxer capacity. First there is the Face who gets the job and then the corp meets with the group. All the players address the corp equally and questions are answered. But really, you don’t think that the corp wouldn’t turn to the cybermachine character and tell him he’s not talking to a fucking toaster and then only address the ‘face’. I wish I had pulled that one of the characters. The second thing, that I *hate* is when one player shops for everybody else. Really? That’s absolutely, without a doubt, utter crap. Pick five friends. Now go do all their shopping for a month. Fuck that. It just won’t happen. Shopping for others is boring and entirely unrealistic and yet if the Charisma high character can get a price discount on stuff, everybody will take advantage of it.
Now back to my point, the killing machine with no empathy, what if you introduced an abstract system of friends and contacts. And your inhuman character no longer has people outside the group to call a friend. Without friends you have nothing to keep, say…your character’s Aspiration Stat afloat, because it’s constantly dwindling like your ammo supply. One cheap way to put your Aspiration stat above zero is to take drugs. Well now, you may have just used game mechanics to enforce the genre, but why not. We have Charisma stats to let us understand how well our character interacts with the world. I think it would be a bold system to have a stat something that represents the core motivation of a character (you say Willpower, I say Aspiration) and that with more cyber, you have less reasons to care about anything. You are dying inside and the only way to make you feel anything is through a drug.
That sounds like a damn fine story potential to me. So instead of making a D&D rip-off, why don’t game designers tailor the rules to their genre more? I wish I knew.
Shadowrun was always a game of prissy elves and sterilized technology, so having cybernetics that always worked and having drugs that were entirely forgettable, was fine. Shadowrun is gritty-lite.
But Cyberpunk really tried to go for a much dirty game and therefore, I blame them entirely for these same failures.
Very quickly: cyberwear was much too clean in Cyberpunk. There was never a chance that it was installed poorly, that it could wear, that it could fail or screw up and become more of a problem that it was worth. It was always superior to have cyberwear over not having it. Cyberpunk’s mechanic to avoid too much tech was a fairly weak mechanic that would lower your Empathy and once it was gone, your character was a raving lunatic (and you lose your character). The mechanic is entirely weak because the player can roll their dice for how much of a loss they take and then judge whether or not their character can take more. Once the roll was done, there was never any adjusting it. Once I hide the character’s rolls but then, a player took too much cyberwear and I was stuck. They didn’t want any more stuff but I rolled and their character became a cyberpyscho and was done for. They were the central character. So what to do? In the end, I ultimately ignored it and told the player not to take any more cyberstuff and he was perfectly happy with that.
Games that try to go for the gritty seem to also lack any moral or ethical system. I guess in the grim future, it’s become perfectly acceptable to shoot low paid security guards in the face and be fine with it later. A good player may take it upon themselves to have a moment of feeling awful, but they’ll get over it (often forgotten about by the next session).
Because of a lack of moral/ethical rules or even rules for stress, a character has no need for things that we use everyday to counter stress. Everybody in this world has a way to escape their lives (many of us pretend that we’re other people). And so too should a good and layered character has those outs. Although a lot of players tend to rely on some arguable ‘weak’ methods of escape: “My character sure does love to clean. Yes sir, after a day of murdering security guards and getting nearly killed, there really isn’t anything I like better than going home and doing something entirely safe and without consequence.”
I’m not saying that every character needs to turn to drugs, but to get into the mindset of the character, living on the gritty streets of Night City, drugs would be everywhere and they would be cheap. All your friends are doing it. People look at you like you’re a damn narc if you don’t take. But most importantly, it fits with the genre that you’ve chosen to game within.
The problem isn’t the world or the genre. It’s the players and how drugs are handled in the game. Recreational drugs almost always give some trivial bonus to skills that won’t come up and give hefty negatives to skills that are important to the game (often combat skills). And of course, right after that, the player gets to read the addition difficulty value and most of them say ‘No dice. My character is living clean.”
Ignoring the fact that booze and smokes are actually addicting drugs (but they’re legal and hence cool and can’t harm anybody), unless the system has a mechanic that handles something as ephemeral as stress, there will never be a reason or a need for a character to take recreational drugs. Games like Cyperpunk try to promote heavy combat and in combat, things that give you the aforementioned negative modifiers, especially when they are optional to begin with.
I believe that hard lives demands hard play. Part of a great Cyberpunk journey, at least the books that started the genre, was about the human part, not the cyber. Sure for the RPG they introduced more corporate hiring of street mercs to pull local black ops, but they completely dropped the ball on making their gritty world…well gritty. The Cyberpunk RPG wasn’t a journey to watch your soul slip away due to cybernetics, bad moral choices, loosing people close to you or even losing yourself into the violent world of gangs and drugs. It was D&D with guns.
In order to make these things compelling, you have to make them compelling to the type of player who wants to play Cyberpunk. You then have to construct rules that say, if you sell this piece of your soul, you get this benefit. Then you have to have the negative be there, but not completely outweigh the benefit and still have some relevance to the game. Players, after all are nothing if not efficient. The street solo (fighter) is completely willing to sacrifice all their social skills to become the bestest killer evar. And it’s all the more apparent in an RPG, because often the player never has to deal with the character on a non-adventure level (heck, nobody would ever want to live the life of this bad-ass machine who goes home and sits on his bed, waiting in quiet until the next time he’s called…it would be boring in the extreme). And furthermore you have another play handle all that ‘sort of thing’. The ‘face’ of the group who gets the contracts and the like. And this is always handled poorly and always handled in true min-maxer capacity. First there is the Face who gets the job and then the corp meets with the group. All the players address the corp equally and questions are answered. But really, you don’t think that the corp wouldn’t turn to the cybermachine character and tell him he’s not talking to a fucking toaster and then only address the ‘face’. I wish I had pulled that one of the characters. The second thing, that I *hate* is when one player shops for everybody else. Really? That’s absolutely, without a doubt, utter crap. Pick five friends. Now go do all their shopping for a month. Fuck that. It just won’t happen. Shopping for others is boring and entirely unrealistic and yet if the Charisma high character can get a price discount on stuff, everybody will take advantage of it.
Now back to my point, the killing machine with no empathy, what if you introduced an abstract system of friends and contacts. And your inhuman character no longer has people outside the group to call a friend. Without friends you have nothing to keep, say…your character’s Aspiration Stat afloat, because it’s constantly dwindling like your ammo supply. One cheap way to put your Aspiration stat above zero is to take drugs. Well now, you may have just used game mechanics to enforce the genre, but why not. We have Charisma stats to let us understand how well our character interacts with the world. I think it would be a bold system to have a stat something that represents the core motivation of a character (you say Willpower, I say Aspiration) and that with more cyber, you have less reasons to care about anything. You are dying inside and the only way to make you feel anything is through a drug.
That sounds like a damn fine story potential to me. So instead of making a D&D rip-off, why don’t game designers tailor the rules to their genre more? I wish I knew.
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