Transport and fast travel

When I’m walking around IRL, I often think how great it would be if you could skitch, jump on a horse, a bike, a motorbike, a moped, a scooter, a skateboard, rollerblades, ice skates, a passing dragon, a helicopter, a power boat, a kayak, on top of a car, the back of a moving bus / train, climb up a building, jump between buildings, hang-glide or parachute off a building, take a lift instantly to the top of a building, sprint infinitely, run on water, teleport anywhere in the world, or otherwise sprout wings and fly. All of these things are available to you in one video game or another. But no video game contains them all.

OK, so it would be odd to have rollerskates in the same game as dragons, and some of these transport options do overlap – you don’t need to be able to skitch and jump on the back of a bus. All you need basically is:

1) A way to travel long distances more or less instantly

2) A way to travel short distances quite quickly

3) A way to travel a scenic route at a decent pace

4) An autopilot travel option that follows the logic and satisfies the impatience of a human player

5) A way to spontaneously generate or easily access all of these options.

Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.

Serious survival challenge

Fallout 3 alternative play mode: If no one’s going to make my perfect survival game, I’ll make it myself. Here is Fallout 3 equipped with rules to make the game more like survival.

No medicines or clean foods / water

This is the wasteland. Everything is irradiated. You can’t be picking up safe medicines, foods and water. The whole idea of running the risk of getting radiation poisoning the longer you stay out on the field doesn’t work if it’s too easy to avoid radiation poisoning. Thus, Radaway and Rad-X are banned, as are purified water and the“fresh” food that can be found in Rivet City’s science lab. Stimpacks heal you way too much. You can carry stimpacks, but only five, and you can never use them for general healing. This is an antidote to an annoying quirk of the game: concussions.

When you have a crippled head, your screen occasionally goes fuzzy. It’s annoying to have fuzzy vision, so the Stimpacks are for curing concussions so you don’t have to put up with them. Fuzzy vision also means you can be blindsided by a powerful enemy. That’s hardly fair, and it’s not as if the combat is the thing that needs its difficulty increased. Substances wearing off or suffering withdrawal also makes your vision go funny, for the record. There’s nothing to be done about it, unless you choose not to take any substances. That will be hard.

The best survival game

Re an earlier post about the flaws with popular survival games like Fallout 3, here is my vision of how survival games should look.

Combat

Players should take and receive more damage per hit so that battles are shorter and require less button mashing. Firearms should be rare and deal as little damage as melee weapons. Everything should be made out of odds and ends: tea trays for shields; ash trays as projectile metal Frisbees for knocking people out; a shard of wood from a broken baseball bat for fixing things, creating leg splints for broken bones, or just used as a weapon in its own right.

Everything should have a damage or defence rating – if your weapon breaks into pieces but you have a cutting board as a shield, you could use it as weapon instead, as scarcity of items might make it the item with the highest damage rating out of everything you’re holding. Enemies have the same pathetic weapons and rarely attack from a distance. Enemies may limp away frantically rather than be killed, or cower and beg for forgiveness – whereupon you can chase them, take their stuff, knock them out, kill them or let them be as you please. This would make the world more characterful.

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.