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.

Mandatory cinematic sequences

Developers, developers, developers, developers. They know they make games. Probably. They might think they’re making films, though, judging by the amount of fake cinematography in them. One difference between actual cinematography and game cinematography is that filming in real life captures an action taking place outside of the cameraman, thus is a presentation medium.

Video games on the other hand are drawn and programmed, thus when you find yourself watching a lengthily cinema sequence, you can’t help but feel those who designed it are enjoying a spot of autofellatio. That is to say, they care far more about their work than they do about whether or not other people particularly want to see it. See, however good the map and graphics are, they are compliments to gameplay, not the gameplay itself. People don’t boot up video games for a passive experience, they do it for an active experience. The result is that however excellent the cinema, a large proportion of us will skip it.

Inventory space

Inventory space in games is a contrived thing. Assuming that we aren’t so deluded as to think video games have to be realistic; and knowing that the processing power and memory of video games today is such that no one player can ever hold so many items as to break the system; and having seen improvements to inventory design that makes them easy to sort through even when there are hundreds of items; I assume the reason for inventory limits is to artificially make the game harder.

Inventories take a few forms. Some of them have “slots”, where you can only have one or a few of the same type of item. For example, you may have a special weapon slot, where you have to choose between the grenade launcher and the flamethrower, or you may have an explosives slot where you choose between the rocket launcher and the RPG. Some allow you a limit of one specific item but allow you to hold all the items in the game at once. For example, you may be able to hold ten medicines and ten antidotes, and having nine medicines doesn’t allow you eleven antidotes. Others are space determined or weight determined, and these are generalised inventory spaces. You choose whether you fill your pockets up with armour, weapons, health items, drugs, food, alcohol, minions, tin cans, and once the space is full, it’s full. Sometimes overfilling your inventory is allowed but carries a cost, such as slowing you down or preventing quick travel.

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?