I don’t think I play video games right.
Which is not to say that I’m bad at them. At this point in my life, I’m pretty natural at most games, and can hold my own with most casual gamers in most games.
It’s just that I don’t think I play them the way they are meant to be played.
For example, I waltzed through Assassin’s Creed: Revelations this break. It’s a good game. If Brotherhood hadn’t been fantastic, I might say it was the best game so far of the series, but almost everything Revelations does well, Brotherhood did better.[1] In any case, AC:R has a couple side-games in addition to the main quest. As with ACII and AC:B, you can capture locations, build up your personal collection of weapons, cultural artifacts, and money, and find little hidden goodies lying around. In the previous two games, these little side gambits—as well as the various coalition-building quests in Brotherhood—provided you with the nice bonus of making your sanctuary more interesting and like you had done something that affected the game-world. In AC:R, the side games do basically nothing for you, especially after you’ve gotten the best weapons and armor in the game from one or another of them.
I, of course, did them all anyway.
That’s right: I renovated every location, found every animus fragment, and even played the very annoying Mediterranean defense mini-game. None of these had any particular rewards associated with them, and unlike Brotherhood, it didn’t seem like renovating the city was part of what I was trying to do. It was truly an unfulfilling side quest.
But, as I said, I did it anyway.
To a lesser extent, the same has been true of my experience with Batman: Arkham City, a more than worthy successor to Arkham Asylum. The plot has some weak moments, but it is great for a non-Bioware video game, the combat is fantastic, everything works well. Still, I found myself devoting more time to solving the Riddler’s challenges or just playing with the combat system than almost anything else (true in Arkham Asylum as well). That’s not to say the game was bad; it is to say that its side quests interested me as much as the main quest did.
What I’m saying, I suppose, is that I’m a completionist: I like getting all the trophies, finding all the heart pieces, unlocking every playable character, etc. In Skyrim, for example, I have gotten every word to every shout. Why? Because. I really didn’t intend to, at first, I just liked exploring Skyrim. But I’ve also ended the rebellion, become the leader of a number of different guilds, and completed—to my knowledge—every Daedric quest.[2]
I am not, in other words, the target audience for most video games. I still say that Morrowind was the greatest video game I’ve ever played. It is still installed on my computer, in fact. Skyrim is better in almost every way: the combat, the visuals, the combat, the voice acting, the combat. Maybe even the story, though I’d fight that conclusion every step of the way.
All this got me thinking about what I would like to see a video game do. There are a lot of different ways of looking at this: I could say I’d like every game to have voice-acting and character development like ME2, for example. That’d be great. Or, I could point to games like Age of Empires 3 and say that its problem was a lack of complexity, that it was too content with a dozen units and should have shot for three or four dozen with lots of different buildings and etc etc.
But I’ll assume, instead, that someone wants to make a action/adventure RPG, since those are really what I know the most about, and where people have been noticeably doing things wrong for the last few years, no matter what Skyrim’s sales may tell you. On that note, I give you my list of things the next great game should do.
1.Go environmentally epic.
This is where Arkham shines, Skyrim has its moments, and Revelations feels strangely unconcerned. Arkham often has three vertical levels going on at all times; the buildings are large—it feels like a city—and most of them are individual or at least organized in individual ways. Skyrim has some wonderful mountains, great Dwarven ruins, and the dragons are one of the more environmentally epic features ever, but the cities—and this was always my complaint about Oblivion as well—feel insubstantial. The big cities in Skyrim feel like they have maybe half the residents that Morrowind’s Vivec did. Running from one side of the city to the other in thirty seconds? Please. Give me cities with population problems, crowded streets, and vendors everywhere you look. One of the things I would like to see is a open-world Bethesda-style RPG set in a city like Assassin’s Creed’s Rome or Constantinople, but with many more options for going into and out of buildings and some more distinctive district ideas. You could imagine a Neverwinter Nights like this, except that they’re making another Neverwinter, which is going to violate the next idea:
2. DON’T dumb it down.
Look, I know that to appeal to a mass audience you have to make it so that a mass audience will buy the game. But last I checked Neverwinter was going to launch with five classes. FIVE! NWN 2 had 15 basic classes + cross-classing + 24 prestige classes and almost all the 3.5 skills, feats, spells etc. There were almost limitless choices for what kind of character you could build. Dragon Age 2, in contrast, had a dozen spells and three classes. Sure, you can break everything down into the components of damage (melee, ranged, or magic) and support (tank, healing, buffing/debuffing, traps/locks), and some games—*cough* Mass Effect 2—can get away with doing that, but games seriously suffer when gameplay choices are taken away from players. The roles of Warlocks, Wizards, and Sorcerers may overlap and there may not be room for the distinction between them in the mechanics of a game, but hybrid classes, complex skill trees, and a wide variety of possible actions are what keep gaming experiences from being rote spell and/or attack button exercises.
Plus, it adds so much more depth to the world to have variety.
3. If you build it, they will come.
Legos may be the best toy ever. Who doesn’t love to build their own things? NWN2, ACII, and Morrowind all allow you to build or at least renovate your own town/city/fortress, and it is awesome. If you’re going to build a giant world, let me do the some non-world saving in it. Let me buy stores, establish trading routes, enact hostile takeovers, become a lord, found my own town.
On that note, make these accomplishments be felt in the world. If I am knighted, have the occasional person greet me as sir; if I run an extensive trading network, as master trader; if I end the civil war, have people mention how glad or annoyed they are with me for doing so. Oblivion and Morrowind had a “Reputation” number, which I always thought was nice, though they should have expanded it, given the character reputation ratings, so that they could slowly go from “unknown” to “every thug/noble/Orcish bard has heard your name” to “you can no longer enter cities undetected.”
4. Never give the player only one thing to do.
This applies in all sorts of different ways. There should never be only one active quest. The player should not be able to simply go from A-Z without being strongly encouraged to some backtracking, sideways movement, even different quest branches. There should be multiple quest givers for every quest chain, and they should often give multiple quests at once. Quest hubs—a single location where all the quests in a story arc focus around—should be avoided unless the arc is about that location. I should go to place x not because it is my quest hub but because I am meeting person y there, who has my next quest, and these quests have me moving all around the playable world. Morrowind does this well: there are four fighter’s guilds, and you must do quests from all of them, and can do them in different orders, favor different locales or types of quests, etc.
5. Make the player worry, then make him or her smirk.
Think Skyrim: if I’m two hours into your game, and I haven’t said “Oh shit that looks/was tough,” you obviously aren’t conjuring dragons from the sky, and something isn’t working. Then, twelve hours later, when I do something similar and have no trouble, the experience is much more satisfying. There’s a balance between making difficulty increase with player skill and giving a sense of character progression so that tasks that were once difficult become simple and skill feels like it has actually progressed.
I actually think all of the above is pretty standard. Number 2 probably will never get followed again, but oh well. That doesn’t mean to imply that any of the following is new, or radical, but it might be a little different.
6. Mix up the traditional tropes.
At this point, everybody who is going to play a fantasy action RPG is going to understand a couple things about elves and dwarves. Dragon Age does a nice job with this actually: the dwarven culture in particular is very interesting from a role-playing perspective, and the elves have a lot to offer if not a lot they actually seem to get to do. Changing the roles of these—or other typical characters, from giants to wizards to dragons to jesters (think King Lear?)—could add significant amount of color to a fantasy world. What about dwarves who, always jealous of the taller humanoids, built flying machines and operate a city in the clouds, who grow beards because they’re basically hippies?
More importantly, I think—and this goes far beyond gaming—is getting rid of the traditional “fall” that is part of almost any scifi or fantasy world. Think of the worlds of Tolkien, Robert Jordan, or George R. R. Martin, for example. Each of them involves a civilization that once saw better times, that seems like it is on its last legs. The same is true of the Elder Scrolls series, of Star Wars, of Metroid Prime. This past fall accounts for all the ruins that are explored, the knowledge and weapons that have lost, etc. Don’t empires and civilizations in their infancy or at the height of their powers have stories to tell as well? Ones that aren’t necessarily those of decline? To be sure, I’m not sure how you could do fantasy without ruins, or without some sort of world-threatening evil, and what are those things to a civilization that is strong, growing, confident?
7. Get rid of the main quest.
WoW already did this, I know. But think about it this way: what if the first quest you got coming out of the tutorial zone of a single-player RPG could be completed immediately and then you just got to explore and open world for an extended period of time? For example, what if the quest was just “Remove the false king” and you could, at least in theory, fight your way to his throne and kill him right off the bat. If he’s dead, there’s no main quest.
Of course, that would be a little anti-climatic. But let’s keep it as an option: the ghost-king who tells you to kill the pretender also mentions that you should gather those still loyal to him. Now, you can go straight up to the throne and—if you’re very skilled—can get rid of the pretender immediately. OR you can go off and find some old generals, the former regent, a wizard, the true heir, start a rebellion, and eventually overthrow the pretender that way. OR you can ignore the ghost-king, go to another part of the world for awhile, become a lord, meet some of the old generals accidentally, convince them to unite under your leadership and get rid of the pretender that way. OR maybe you ingratiate yourself to the pretender, become part of his retinue, go kill the true heir, etc. and eventually stab (or kill with ear-poison) the pretender once you’ve earned his trust.
Or maybe you just ignore him. There is a plot point here: a pretender currently sits on the throne, as you have been alerted by a ghost-king. You’d have to keep the options semi-limited, and it would be a lot of work, but it wouldn’t be that hard to have an open world RPG in which plot point A has four or five cut-scene / world variable options, say: 1. killed by assassin, chaos ensues; 2. killed in rebellion, true heir takes throne; 3. killed in rebellion, pc takes throne; 4. killed by advisor, who claims throne; 5. still alive. The actions taken in between receiving the quest and completing it determine the outcome, but you’re not told that you have to do any of them, or even make the choices. Scatter in another ten or so plot points like that, and you’ve got a world which the player truly shapes.
[1] Assassin management is a wash, as Mediterranean defense gives you something to actually do with them but is all sorts of annoying if you actually try to do it. The non-weapon items (i.e., bombs) are better in AC:R. Otherwise, however, I’ll stand by the statement and say that AC:R fails to successfully re-incorporate the either weird puzzle-memories or the expansive platforming of ACII and Brotherhood. The story is worse, as well, but the real tragedy is that lack of weird, historically-situated puzzles, which were such a highlight of the previous two games.
[2] As a note, lots of publications are calling Skyrim the game of the year. I won’t quibble, though I might choose Arkham City over it. I’m not entirely sure. Regardless, I would say that one area that Skyrim really screws up is the civil war. The opening—the chopping block, the dragon, the politics of it all—is incredibly epic, but it ends up being a tired series of quests that ends with a couple of nice speeches and little else. No one in Skyrim seems to acknowledge that you have altered the balance of power within the Empire. They had the chance to really make something out of the rebellion, making the player a jarl or even of taking a third route and trying to become High King themselves. Instead, people still act like there’s still a rebellion going on after the player ends it. An opportunity lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment