Whence we sprung

We’re being forced to return to where we came from.

Home. Home is where the heart is. Or, failing that, the car. And the wardrobe. And the random pieces of crap you’ve collected on your travels. I could quite easily be describing life itself, but I’m actually describing the world of video games where you own a safehouse or some kind of base. Sometimes, several.

I have mixed feelings about homes in games. It does sometimes satisfy the nesting instinct to return home and put a load of things away in drawers. Working up to buying a house or several houses quickly becomes the aim of many a game which is supposed to be about stealing cars or fighting dragons. But, such homes usually create the necessity to return periodically; to drop off, to pick up, to heal, to organise, to faff about.

Replay value

At some point, games reviewers started examining games based on a mysterious thing called “replay value”. It is the idea that, now games have moved more into storytelling, they threaten to be over as soon as completed, as opposed to being playable many times. Since most people buy rather than rent games, you would want a game on your shelf to have replay value, or the ability to remain interesting upon second play. Either that, or you would want a game so long that you forget the start before you get to the end – I doubt video games will reach that peak for a while, requiring as it does far more power and work than simply programming in some collectables.

Holiday in the wastelands

When you aren’t dying instantly, these post-apocalyptic worlds are quite cushy.

Survival games are a genre of which there are not a great many console games. They largely appear to be mini-games on Steam, or ancient PC games for people who love a challenge. Albeit one that involves sitting safely behind a keyboard with a cup of something brown and tasty. By far the most famous survival game is Fallout 3 and there’s a very good reason for this; Fallout 3 is very, very easy, where most survival games – including the Fallout series before Bethesda got hold of it – are exceptionally tough.

As the name suggests, survival games are about not dying. You try to find food, while trying not to be food yourself. It’s incredibly easy to poison yourself, drown, fall down a ditch, walk into a trap or a sharp set of teeth. In times when video games are adjusted to be less punishing and more optionally challenging, Fallout 3 was the first survival game (that I know of) to have the survival elements there, but the risk of death reasonably low.

Cheating

“Playing” implies trivial. Let’s do what we damn please.

I’m disappointed in Rockstar, in the same way as one is disappointed by a very rebellious and reckless friend who stays at home one Saturday and watches The Real Housewives of Orange County. In amongst all the destruction and delicious amorality, there’s a flaw in the direction of their game design which is utterly incongruous to their whole philosophy. What happened to the cheats?

Double-agent open world

Or to be more accurate, the Hitman-stealth-sandbox-war-double-agent-survival-exploration game.

In writing a post on moral choice systems, two contrary things occurred to me. First: “The moral choice system is absurd! It limits freedom and stunts gameplay.” Second: “Yet… If the concept of ‘moral choice’ was less of an arbitrary one-dimensional-gauge and more of a play style, it could be the funnest thing ever.” In the process of having a go at Fallout 3 for making it too easy to be “good” whether you wanted to be or not, I started imagining what it would look like if it was easy to be bad.

I came up with a exploration-survival sandbox game that most resembles Hitman in concept, or other stealth / double agent type games. There aren’t enough free-roam double-agent games, whereby players wander around manipulating every possible side of a conflict unpredictably for personal gain. Which is odd, because that tends to be the way people naturally play moral choice games; we may pick a side to start with, but get bored of our loyalties and screw someone over.

Timeline tangents

Suggested alternative to moral choice system

The well-bashed moral choice system, I maintain should generally not be used in games. However, for people who still find the idea vaguely enticing, there are ways to adjust the style so that it is more rewarding for players.

In moral choice systems, choice is stuffed in at the end of the mission and the full ramifications of it can’t be experienced just by saving before making the decision and loading after a few minutes playing through the consequences of the choice. Sometimes such an intervention is impossible, sometimes it takes a while for you to realise your mistake. Sometimes the choice is sandwiched in the middle of a mission, complicating this ploy. But more than anything else, it shouldn’t be necessary; developers should account for player curiosity and our tendency to want the best deal out of any action.

Moral choice systems

The problem with moral choice systems is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to win with them. Gawd knows, developers have tried. They’ve written whole alternative storylines and endings just to create replay value or variety. However, I contest that there is much of either being added. Here are all the ways in which moral choice systems have panned out, and the various ways in which they fail drastically.

Quit yo jibba-jabbin!

Friendly NPCs don’t half go on and on.

The other day I had quite a long day out in company and I found myself thinking how nice it would be to have a Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls companion. Someone who never speaks unless spoken to, never “chats” or wastes a word on anything that doesn’t serve a tidy purpose, and provides a variety of services on demand with nary a complaint and barely a comment. People that carry your bags, go away when you tell them to go away without getting offended, and come back when you tell them to come back.

It had been a very long day.

Stealth: In the eye of the beholder

Stealth games have improved a lot in recent years, favouring less tactical step-by-step avoidance of passing human drones and more inventive means of averting detection using the map design. Later incarnations removed the necessity of lurking in the shadows and also lessened its effectiveness somewhat; improvements in AI also made the patterns of movement more difficult to spot and predict. Yet there are still odd details left unchecked.

Walk, run, sprint

If you don’t mind, I’d like to get to that cave yonder sometime today.

I’d like to know which bright spark game up with introducing stamina restrictions for running. “I know,” he cried. “What people really want is to be unable to move at a decent speed without holding down [or, heavens, tapping] one button constantly. That way they will appreciate it.” And lo, much hand cramp was had by all.

This in turn necessitates building the stamina bar, either by training or by adding it as a special ability. Rather than make people enjoy the later parts of the game more, it makes people dislike the beginning of the game, where they know they will have to put up with pathetically sluggish movement. It makes travelling from points of interest relatively close to each other an absolute chore. In no time at all, we take easy movement for granted.