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The Firing Line #4 July 01, 2003 Brett Todd |
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Summary:
Keep it Simple, Stupid
What's got Brett barking up the wrong tree this week in the Firing Line? One word: genre-bending. Has games gotten too complex as of late with dashes of multiple genres mixed together? Just give me my FPS without the superfluous narrative drivel! I just want to see things go boom without someone debriefing me about it.
 Genre-Bending Isn’t Good For You | Page:: ( 1 / 4 ) |
Brett Todd on The Firing Line:
Keep it simple, stupid
Keep it simple, stupid
I knew that Star Trek: Elite Force II was in trouble as soon as the dialogue tree appeared. Where I’d loaded up the shooter to, y’know, shoot stuff, Ritual Interactive apparently labored under the mistaken impression that I wanted to engage in a duel of double entendres with a boobile alien scientist. The developer didn’t provide much in the way of action and cool sci-fi weapons, preferring to load me down with romance, hot-and-heavy tricorder analysis, and debriefing sessions with Jean-Luc Picard. In the end, what I got wasn’t a shooter so much as a first-person adventure, “adventure” being the new code word for genre-bending crap that messes up the design focus so much that games have no discernible identity.
And there’s a lot of that going around these days. Every game in every genre seeks to blend in elements of every other genre, apparently so buyers will be happy no matter if they prefer bloody DOOM-influenced shooters or something from the Mary-Kate and Ashley oeuvre.
Even the biggest games have fallen victim to these scattershot design principles. Elite Force II is crammed with so much unnecessary exposition that every two minutes spent battling alien bugs is bookended by five-minute cutscenes loaded with balderdash about diagnostics and sensor arrays. Multiplayer shooters now come with character classes and experience point options. Neverwinter Nights dumps the soap-opera stuff and traditional roleplaying for a highly stylized focus more about new technology than story development in the vein of the Baldur’s Gate games. Pirates of the Caribbean hits stores this week accompanied by blurbs that call it “a thrilling blend of RPG and action.”
Has any game actually accomplished this goal? Every “thrilling blend” that I’ve experienced either turned out to be complete garbage or was good despite the addition of cross-genre features. Most of these efforts embrace innovation for its own sake. Innovation has become a goal, rather than a means to provide a great gaming experience. We end up with games that are high on concept and low on playability. Perhaps it would make a difference if developers weren’t just picking and choosing done-to-death aspects of each traditional genre like some sort of game-design smorgasbord. But all they’re doing is cutting and pasting foreign content. So we get dialogue trees in the midst of shooters, arcade mini-games cluttering up roleplaying epics, and so on. It’s about as revolutionary as one of Andy Warhol’s color-by-numbers paintings of Marilyn Monroe, and as creative as daubing a moustache on Mona Lisa’s upper lip.
Genre-bending is limiting developers. Sprinkling traces of roleplaying games into shooters might seem freeing, in that players would no longer be stuck with all that tedious shooting, but in reality it puts both designers and gamers into a tight box. Too much effort is being expended on tarting things up. Rather than dedicate themselves to the core elements that make each gaming genre what it is, devs are branching out in an attempt to be all things to all players. Nobody’s got the time or the budget to add these elements properly, so we’ve been getting tacked-on junk that waters down the end product.
SIDEBAR: Hey, didn’t Jakub like the RPG-like skills in Enemy Territory? Hmm…
| Grafted features | Page:: ( 2 / 4 ) |
Whole Wheat is for Hippies
And nobody seems to have considered that the addition of material from other genres might make games unpalatable to the dedicated fanbase. Making big changes indicates developers that are either woefully out of touch with their fans, or more interested in marketing ploys than designing enjoyable games. Sure, multiple Star Trek endings about getting it on with alien babes might be a selling point to the uninitiated willing to try a shooter for a change of pace. But it’s apt to turn off more shooter fans than convert adventure gamers. Twitch gamers want to twitch, not collect experience points and hone their pickup lines. Adventurers aren’t going to appreciate the interruption of their puzzle solving to blast bugs. You’ve got a game that nobody but the dedicated Star Trek geek is going to embrace. No offense to those noble basement dwellers whose pulses still quicken whenever Geordi calls for a level-three diagnostic on the sensor array, but this isn’t a marquee marketing angle during these bleak days of Scott Bakula.
More than just shooters are being affected by genre-bending. Roleplaying games are often more concept than story today. Neverwinter Nights still seems like more of a sop to shooter-centric online modders than a properly thought-out successor to the Baldur’s Gate series. Yes, the toolkit is amazing, the module-making community a wonder to behold. But it’s not much of a roleplaying game. The original campaign is dull and the expansion doesn’t seem to offer many improvements. Competitors like Gothic and Pirates of the Caribbean might not have made as many sacrifices, although the developers have cluttered up the story-telling and strategizing with arcade-style sequences. Do we need even a single game that mars roleplaying with real-time ship combat? One is surely going to be an albatross around the neck of the other. Strategy games are almost entirely real-time now, a desire to please action gamers with mouseslinging that’s killing sober second thought. Command & Conquer: Generals, World War II: Frontline Command, and many other recent strategy titles have come stripped of everything unrelated to hurling units at the enemy.
There’s also the consideration that changing the learning curve so much might cause people to fall out of the loop entirely. Sometimes, grafted-on features make games so different, so challenging, that they’re too difficult to play. I’ve been faced with that myself of late in the shooter genre. I feel like I’m growing out of touch, especially when it comes to multiplayer games like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. While I’m all for adding depth to deathmatching, there is so much complexity in this Splash Damage freebie that I’m at a complete loss. The classes, the experience points, the skillsets, the massive maps with multiple team objectives confuse me even after hours of play. I feel like someone’s rearranged my neighborhood, taking familiar houses and street layouts and jumbling them into such a mess that I can’t find my way home. It’s unsettling to the point that I can’t see continuing to play the game, even though the small part of me that isn’t bewildered knows that it’s a fantastic product.
Sometimes, white bread is the best choice on the menu. There is a real value in knowing what you’re playing. Particularly when you’re being asked to shell out $50 for the privilege with no ability to get your money back. When I buy a shooter, I want a shooter. When I buy a roleplaying game, I want a roleplaying game. When I buy a strategy game, I want a strategy game. Additional stuff is nice, if presented in moderation and is tied into the shooting and roleplaying and strategizing in a meaningful way. But it’s not absolutely necessary if the heart of the game is intact. That’s a lesson that I wish developers would learn before I have to endure any more tacked-on romantic subplots.
SIDEBAR: So my best friend, at age 24, finally decides to get drunk for the first time. It’s going to be so entertaining.
| Return Fire | Page:: ( 3 / 4 ) |
Detroit Motor City!
Okay, I didn’t buy Motor City Online, either. But I did get a freebie press copy and I paid to play the game for nearly a year, courtesy of the occasional drunken desire to trick out an old Dodge Charger and dumbly missing the credit-card cutoff every month. Oh, it’s the ninth again already? Damn, I’ll have to make a note and be sure and cancel by the eighth next month. Et cetera.
Anyhow, even though I stacked up at least a hundred bucks in user fees for the right to play Motor City Online for maybe 30 hours, I am not outraged that EA sent it to the wrecking yard. Yeah, it was a massive waste of money and time, but I sort of knew that from the very beginning. Spending any amount of money and time on any game, massively multiplayer or not, is a huge waste when you get right down to it. I can’t get any more self-indignant about blowing cash on a game than I already am. EA took my money and ran. So what? I could say the same about every other game publisher happy to accept a donation from my meagre reservoir of credit-card supplied funds. I’m ripping myself off whenever I pay and play. The money’s gone and the time is killed, no matter if the game goes down in my record books as good or bad. Sorry to get so bleak and philosophical, but I’ve been eating a lot of Chinese food lately and I think the fortune cookies are making me finally see that making things go bloop-bloop, bleep-bleep on the computer screen isn’t condusive to “building a life with divine prosperity.” It’s either that or the MSG.
But I share Tom’s worries about the pricing schemes, particularly as it could be applied to previously free services like Blizzard’s Battle.net (especially in light of ominous developments like the recent resignations of four company founders, including vice-president Bill Roper, over supposed morale problems under Vivendi Universal management). Everyone who goes online to play any sort of game is being asked to shoulder an ever-increasing share of the development costs and ongoing maintenance fees through exorbitant up-front prices and skyrocketing monthly charges.
What bothers me most is that the products aren’t getting any better. They’re just getting glitzier. That $15 they’re charging per month for Star Wars Galaxies must be purely so George Lucas can afford to adopt more kids, as it sure isn’t doing anything for playability. And of course this is just going to push other games to adopt the same lofty price structure, whether they’ve licensed a huge franchise or not. If Motor City Online launched tomorrow, it’d go for at least $12 a month, and all it’d have to offer would be burly avatars with mutton-chops and customized Hemi Cudas.
That alone makes me think that we’re a long way from the “MMO winnowing” of Tom’s dreams. The promise of making of quick buck from a few months of gullible subscribers who, like yours truly, are too stupid to immediately cancel their accounts when they realize that the game is crap, is too high at the moment. Star Wars Galaxies isn’t finished. It doesn’t feature landspeeders or TIE Fighters, let alone Jedi Knights. It’ll still debut at the top of the charts and make millions. The lesson? Crap sells if it’s got a big license attached to it. That alone will keep the money-grubbing alive, at least through the coming launches of similar big-name MMOGs based on The Lord of the Rings and the Marvel Universe of superheroes. And it can’t help but persuade those who control Blizzzard’s purse strings that they should be getting a piece of the action. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
SIDEBAR: Jakub is like Unicron... only bigger
| Screenshot of the Week | Page:: ( 4 / 4 ) |
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Shot of the Week:
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight
I’d be lying if I claimed to be a huge flight sim buff, and God knows Chick will deride me again for dull screenshots, but this is the best I can do this week. Everything else that I’ve been playing has already made it into stores, and besides, there’s something pretty cool about flying planes representing the entire history of aviation. Even if you don’t get the chance to shoot up Fokker triplanes and carpet-bomb Laotian villages.
Brett “Old Fogie” Todd… I mean uh… the mack-daddy Toddster has let you know whattup wit’ da wackass overcomplicated games, yo. The brother here sez to keep it real, devs, or he’s gonna have to bust a 9 in yo’ ass.
He wants old school, he wants simple, he doesn’t want any damn dialogue trees in the middle of alien-vaporization sequences. Is it really too much to ask an action game to be about action? Or maybe he really is getting on in years and just can’t handle the l33t shizzle like Enemy Territory. You decide, you let us know - so take a deep breath and Sound Off!
SIDEBAR: I don’t know where the ‘this is the end, my only friend’ line comes from. I’m pretty sure it’s a movie though.