Shadow Covenant

Found an interesting blog post today at Rampant Games: http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=3648.

While I don’t agree with lots of what is said, some of the points are valid.

Story and games have a different existence together… The actions of the player usually don’t modify the game world, and when they do it’s in a purely binary fashion. So, the player isn’t part of the story, which seems counter-intuitive in a sense that a lot of effort is put into immersing the player in the story.

The conclusions Paul Spooner in the above article draws from this are too restrictive and just go into the old RPG concept of DM/Player symbiosis, while I think there’s two layers to any game: an interactive layer and a story layer… They can conflict occasionally, but its possible to create game mechanics that stop the player from interfering with the story, without seemingly restrict freedom: an example of this is a story where the player needs to be a good guy and he’s out having fun murdering little children. If you attach a penalty coherent (like an alignment penalty) with the game story with the act of murdering children, the player won’t do it (or if he does, he’s aware that it might make his life more difficult in the long run).

I think that the main issue is not story vs. interactivity, but story vs. fun…

Let’s imagine the above example… the story we have designed is the typical hero of the light story, where only a hero pure of heart can defeat the dark overlord of legend. To be coherent with the game story, if the player murders innocent people, he’ll loose the pure heart and will be unable to stop the overlord… Both of these mechanics are easy enough to be implemented; the player retains his freedom, and the story can run its course… But is it fun? Is it fun to make the player go throughout the whole game, just to fail at the final boss, because in the beginning of the game he stole a villager’s purse? It’s not fun, but it is accurate in terms of both story and gameplay!

You have loads of stories without happy endings in literature, movies and other forms of narrative art, but that is seldom seen in games, because it is thought (and I agree with that) that it isn’t fun…

That’s what I think it’s missing in the above article… other than that, it’s an excellent read!

Two more games bite the dust:

I liked the first Dead Space game… Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting anything special, but it kind of worked for me… The plight of Engineer Isaac was the kind of thing that works in survival horror, and trying to figure out what went wrong on the Ishimura was interesting enough to keep the game going forward…

So, my expectations for Dead Space II were a bit higher… and boy, was I disappointed! 🙂 They tried to flesh out the main character some more (which kind of make me unlike him, it didn’t seem genuine anymore), they were trying too hard to push the “horror” (which kind of loses its edge after the n-th time an enemy jumps out from somewhere, even with the limited supply of ammunition the game has), and towards the end, the game even got lazy by adding indestructible monsters and the “you’ll take damage no matter how well you play” factor…

I can’t say exactly where the game lost me, but finishing it was a chore (specially that idiotic final fight, where you had to work with whatever you had with infinitely spawning enemies)…

The main problem, as I see it, is the fact that the game doesn’t evolve the story, characters and game world… you’re just playing the same game again, but instead of being in the Ishimura (and you’ll be in there, by the way), you’re in a colony/space yard, in the midst of a xenomorph outbreak that “noone could predict”… for how long will we have these uni-dimensional bad guys that always think they can control uncontrollable forces?!

All in all, objectively, it’s not a bad game, it just feels that way due to some lazy design and associating “survival horror” to “you don’t have enough ammo to kill them all”… 6/10

LA Noire is an amazing game at the same time it fails spectacularly… Let me start by saying I love the Noire setting, but I didn’t feel it in LA Noire… For me, “Noire” involves a broken PI (preferably alcoholic) that gets conned by a mysterious woman to take some case in which she’s involved to her eyeballs, while feigning innocence… Maybe I’m reducing a whole genre to its more basic expression, but that was what I wanted to play in LA Noire, not some “straight arrow” cop that was too good at his job and had to be taken down…

Ignoring that pet peeve, this is probably the first game I’ve ever played in the last 10 years that really gives you the feeling of being involved in an investigation, analyzing clues and talking to suspects, trying to call their lies into question, or doubting them until they gave us worthwhile information…

The problem with the game is the cuddling it gives to the players… the game treats the players like morons, and takes away the real use of their investigative brains… This is noticeable when you always want to accuse everyone of lying and then back up from the accusation… the way the suspects react to the accusation gives us a clear clue on if they’re lying or not, and if you decide they’re lying, you just have to choose the correct piece of evidence… if their reaction is off someone telling the truth, you just back out of the accusation and choose another investigation path… The much-talked about facial animation system (which is amazing, by the way – first time I saw throat/larynx movement in facial animation in a game) makes it too easy to tell if the a character is telling the truth or lying… The fact you don’t have many dead end clues doesn’t help to the atmosphere aswell.

Of course, this has been a discussion for a long time: how easy/accessible we want the games to be to our customers, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer… I’d venture that it’s better to fail towards the easy side than towards the hard side, from a commercial perspective…

The action sequences are also terrible, feeling constrained, out of place and simplistic in their approach… no challenges there and it just seems a way to waste time on the way to the next piece of storytelling…

The storyline is very interesting (although not “Noire” enough for me, as I stated above), and most of the graphics are very good (bar the odd pixelated/blurry textures here and there). I say most because the female characters are probably the worse I’ve seen in ages… they all look 100 years old, which is kind of annoying when you’re interviewing a 20-year old wanna-be starlet and it seems like your grandmother… kind of ruins the immersion… Male characters are quite good, on the other hand.

LA Noire could be (and in some level it is) one of the most revolutionary games in the last decade (much more than Heavy Rain, to be honest, which the game has some similarities to), but trying to reach for a wider audience kind of spoiled it for me… But, nowadays, a 20-hour game (with a 65% completion rate) at standard price, it’s a good buy! 🙂 8/10

Next on my game list: Pixel Junk Shooter 2…

Well, there go my good intentions… work and laziness have won, and I’ve not been updating… But I’m going to try to change that again, starting this weekend: another Ludum Dare competition!

I’ll probably participate in it, using my usual framework, that needs some more work on it, since I want to add support for skeletal animation (through my own Reality format)… I want to try my hand in designing some 3d characters and animating them…

On the game playing front, not much going on… Played through "Dragon Age 2" and I’m playing "Metal Gear Solid IV" (which I probably won’t be finishing), besides loads of "Band Hero" and some "World of Warcraft".

"Dragon Age 2" was nice, but it’s nowhere as good as Mass Effect… the CRPG component (the stats and skills part) is almost absent (it’s a very basic system, in which you really don’t really feel any impact on the decisions you make), but the RPG part was actually very good, since I felt my decisions impacted the game world and the distinction between "good" and "bad" decisions was very blurred in some instances, which made it more "real". The gay thing everybody’s talking about was taken a bit too far, in my opinion… I almost felt raped (and I think this runs a bit against the whole "gay is a choice, not a disease" vibe the developers wanted)… Another bad decision (in my humble view, of course) was the fact that the "troubles" were too local… although it ends up being more "real" and different from the usual "thou must taketh the artifact to somewhereth elseth", it takes a lot of the "epic" from it…
In other perspective, the graphics were sometimes appallingly bad (except for the facial rendering, which was very good, although a bit wooden in terms of expressions, but that’s to be expected in this kind of massive games), but it was a competent affair most of the time.
All in all, the game is interesting, and I had a good time playing it, but I think the series is going in a direction I don’t care much for (but again, this is a matter of taste)… 7/10

On the other hand, "Metal Gear Solid IV" is terrible…. I fail to understand why people loved this so much… the story is convoluted and makes little sense (and the sense it does seems like a soap-opera), the graphics are average, the storytelling is erratic, the missions are dreary and punishing (checkpoints at the beginning of the level only?! What is this, 1985?!), terrible controls…
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against the series as a whole, I loved the first 2 MGS, they had proper pacing (even if the story was already terrible), but this one is just a grind to get to the next (idiotic) cutscene… Maybe the problem is me, but I think that a stealth game should give us enough stealth opportunities, with loads of different paths, etc, and not make us wait behind a car for 1 minute for the patrol to go away, for lack of other paths… this hurts when you’re doing the scene for the n-th time, always getting a bit further using stealth… I end up finishing the levels by shooting everything, which kind of defeats the whole "tactical espionage" thing, in my opinion… 4/10…

Since I’m just bitching about stuff… I’ve been working on an iPad application for work… and I hate Macs more and more each day… 🙂 The fact that I connect my nice keyboard to it and it still doesn’t map all keys correctly (not even using Ukalele and other such applications) pisses me off to no end… And don’t get me started with XCode! I’ve ended up mapping a directory of the iMac to my harddrive and just using Visual Studio to develop, just using the iMac as a compiler (BTW, if you want to share a keyboard and a mouse only, without need for video, take a look at Synergy, which is a software-only solution for multiple systems, which is pretty cool if you want to do stuff like I’m doing)…
Even so, I’m still stuck with debugging with XCode, which is terrible for a person that’s used to Visual Studio’s debugger… I know half the problems I have with it might be solved with some web-searches, etc, but how hard would it be for me to be able to see the contents of an STL vector right in the debugger window out of the box?!
The iPad itself is not a bad piece of hardware, my application runs lots of triangles (even a bitmap based font renderer, which is pretty triangle heavy) without any big problems… I can definitely see the potential for gaming in that platform, although I don’t think most games play well there (the ones that use a "virtual d-pad" and stuff don’t work too well for me); but it’s easy to see the appeal for independent game developers… I’m more of a PC-dev guy, since most my game ideas are of a different focus that doesn’t translate well for iOS devices.

So, that’s it for now… Hopefully I’ll be more regular again from now on… want to get my hands on that "Portal 2" thingy, and Pixel Junk’s "Shooter 2", besides improving on my artist skills, so I can do better on competitions…