Nier

Nier is a game that is kind of unusual in structure but which would easily and quickly win a game of jRPG Trope Bingo. You briefly enjoy a text-adventure boss fight, but you then visit Desert Town and grind for items for villagers. Kaine might curse a bit, but her armor is not only beyond impractical, it’s somehow a plot point that she gets stabbed in the chest on three separate occasions. Boy, some armor would be really helpful in a situation like that!

One problem with the game’s structure is the dungeons. Like many games, you venture into dungeons to grab Macguffins, unlock new powers and fight gigantic bosses. In Zelda games, you get your new ability about halfway through the dungeon and you’re forced to use it to overcome the obstacles of the dungeon. In Nier, you wander through hallways, fight the same enemies over and over, take on the Big Boss and then you get a fancy new ability. Zelda uses dungeons as a training ground for new abilities; Nier’s dungeons are just filler. Zelda bosses have a specific weakness to whatever new weapon you’ve acquired; Nier asks you to take a wild fucking guess at the best strategy at defeating a boss through trial and error, and then asks you to go through the entire process three more times to see All The Endings.

I ragequit Nier twice during boss battles where the bosses spam magic bullets at you with very little chance of evasion. There’s a hard limit on how many healing items you can carry and no chance to replenish before facing the boss. Very, very few enemies require the same sort of tactics you’ll use on a boss. Zelda teaches you how to defeat a boss through its dungeon structure. Nier throws you into the dungeon and gives you a gimmick boss and dares you to get it right on your first try.

I did finish the game, but mostly because of the setting. There are only about eight locations in the world, which makes for a smaller, relaxed and more intimate scope. After a certain point, the protagonist mentions the world is in decline, and it seems like a well-supported conclusion. You visit the towns, see how they struggle to get by and understand how the frontier is pressing in on them throughout your travels. In the early acts of the game, it’s a quick journey through frontier areas to visit each town. A few quests challenge you to reach another town without dodging enemies or getting hit, which is feasible in the wide-open spaces linking locations. Once the enemies ramp up, venturing into the field is legitimately dangerous with tons of enemies spamming magic and swarming over you. Unfortunately, the limited scope backfires when Act II ends up repeating Act I scene-for-scene in almost the exact same order.

There’s also a nonsense plot, vaguely explained, about um, Shades? Betrayals where the bad guys spend 90% of their time straight-up helping you destroy their plans? “Sacrifice”? Whatever. Rest assured, this is a game where you Kill Bad Guys with a sword and then, after all the killing, the game tries to pretend you’re the real monster.

I was told that Nier subverted design tropes, that it was a meta-RPG, that it Tackled The System. It doesn’t. You kill bad guys, you get stronger. If it wanted to do something different besides a tacked-on text adventure, which in all honesty seems like a level sequence that got cut, it could have tried going backwards. If the game is about the decline of a world and the disappearance of humans, wouldn’t it make more sense to start with a horrifically strong protagonist with a ton of abilities, who gradually loses those abilities as his world collapses around him? A game where you lean on your abilities until they are taken away from you and then you are left only with the skill you’ve acquired over the course of playing the game? A game where your strength can’t save the world, not even once? A game where destiny is final and can’t be rewritten by The Chosen One? That would go a lot further toward subverting jRPG tropes than having a sassy sidekick complain about fetch quests.

Prototype2

Prototype2 is full of cheap shots. The game starts with Blackwater--I MEAN BLACKWATCH (subtle!) being referred to as “baby-killers”. Every other word of almost every line of dialogue is “fuck”. Collectible audio logs are almost all variations of “hey should we kill some civilians?” (yes). The bad guys are bad because their “tests” are “what happens if we release some monsters onto some caged civilians?” Oh, and a prominent plot point involves torturing an eight-year-old girl.

I almost had to stop playing at that point. Between torturing a child and the incessant, overwhelming amount of gore, the game was actually starting to affect me. I had dreams full of the red, gushing organic material that coats the Red Zone. I put down the game for a few days. Picked it up for another hour to finish it off, just to get a sense of closure. Haven’t picked it up again since.

Weirdly, the game features a priest as an informant/sidekick/confidant for a bit. One might think that could lend a degree of moral concern to the game. Nope. This priest isn’t concerned with your actions as much as he’s concerned with dispensing plot points obtained through questionable means: “Hey, sucks your family is dead. Check out this military conversation I intercepted!” Well okay, and then he dies and is replaced by another informant who dispenses missions. Then another informant shows up, but she dispenses plot points while sexily bending over to use her laptop, which appears to be placed at thigh level. It’s like, there’s a counter right there. I can see it. If you moved your laptop there, it would probably improve your posture a whole lot.

Anyway. Prototype2. Life is cheap. In case you couldn’t tell while you’re mowing down a crowd of civilians to regain health or pop an achievement.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Hey look, if you’re going to make a by-the-book game, then I am going to write a by-the-book look at it. With bullet points.

• Pacing problems: the Desmond plot is urgent while the Ezio plot is languorous. The game works better when you feel like you need to explore the ancient memories while Desmond poopsocks in the Animus because otherwise why are you reliving an ancient male power fantasy when you are actually dying?

• Plot problems: Not really “about” Ezio or even Altair. It’s about filling in a few blanks and spending some time on the Apple of Eden subplot instead of cramming said subplot into the last five minutes of the third act.
• The more we learn about these crazy time-travelling aliens, the dumber they seem. “Fragmentation of society due to the massive unchecked power of the Apple” would have been a lot more thematically appropriate than “unstoppable natural disaster”. 
• Even the Ezio plot didn’t have the elaborate conspiracies and double-crosses I’ve come to expect. Instead it was, “Hey, grab six Macguffins. Now here is a bad guy. The end.”
• Actually, it’s not really fair to say that the plot is about filling in the alien subplot. It’s also about the philosophical battle between the Templars and Assassins. Ezio kills a man who turns out to be innocent. Altair deals with the corruption of a friend. Desmond has just killed his mentor and almost-girlfriend. The Templars, in contrast, claim to be seeking knowledge. They fight in self-defense against the Assassins who invaded their city. The Templars aren’t all good, of course, but neither are they entirely in the wrong this time around. It’s like Ezio’s age has tempered the message of the series. It’s no longer “Templars Bad, Assassins Good”. It’s “Who Do You Trust With The Apple?”

• Mission structure: I really enjoyed the missions where you had to hold down forward and A, almost as much as I enjoyed the missions where you didn’t have to do anything except walk up to a person and put down the controller.
• There was ONE infiltration-and-assassination mission. That’s ridiculous.
• The game has a ton of trouble sticking to its core strengths. It’s not that additional systems are diluting the experience, it’s that for a game about assassination, there were an awful lot of horse carriage chases and walk-and-talks.
• The Desmond scenes really illustrate this perfectly. The Animus “island”, which I suppose is a poorly explored, clichéd metaphor for “the ocean of the unconscious”, has none of the climb-and-explore game-play AC is known for. The Desmond missions are a first-person jumping puzzle game.
• Which I don’t even. I got turned around so many times that I lost sight of where I was supposed to go, and I didn’t have any access to any of the tools I would normally have in an AC game (like a minimap or eagle vision) to help me out. It was abstract for the sake of being abstract. Desmond’s whining retcons* about how he didn’t listen to his mommy and daddy doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in his moral fiber. I ended up rage-quitting** the second puzzle just so I could get on with my life.

(*) Seriously, didn’t he wake up in an Abstergo building and play dumb about Templars and Assassins? The entire point of Desmond--as I saw it--was that he was the “everyman” who gets swept up in something larger than himself. He is the player vessel, meant to guide the player through a complicated plot. To say that he was secretly aware the entire time (and trained!) not only means the player cannot relate to him as well as before, but it also means that the Animus’s bleeding effect, which supposedly was serving to train “everyman” Desmond in the ways of the Assassins, was a waste of time.
(**) It’s worth noting that I am the guy who rage-quit Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. I am not a patient gamer.

Fiddly Bits

• The game starts with the Ubisoft logo glitching out, implying a sort of digital corruption. Then Ezio hallucinates that he sees his ancestor in a callback to the bleeding effect. Then you see Desmond is in a coma, wherein his subconscious is dealing with the scrambled personality of the previous Animus test subject and is struggling to regain his sense of self. These elements are perfect for a ghost-in-the-machine type of story about Desmond’s shattered conscious, Ezio’s aging mind, and Sixteen’s shattered sanity. Instead, we got a story about a Strong Male Character who seduces a sexy librarian.
• The bleeding effect itself is an extremely powerful element. We’ve all gone to bed and dreamed of the games we’ve just marathoned. When Desmond is first confronted with the ghosts of guards in AC2, I about jumped out of my skin while mashing the attack button. It’s something that connects to the player in an instinctive way. To hint at the glitch in the Matrix in the intro and then drop it completely is the biggest tease in the series so far. 
• Incidentally, will Desmond ever explore his matrilineal memories? Hahahahah no.
• The assassin deployment mini-game is improved, making map territories more meaningful. I complained about that in Brotherhood, and it’s fixed now. Okay.
• Too many fiddly bits with the bombs. Finding treasure, especially early in the game, is less about, “Sweet! A much needed infusion of cash,” and more about, “x2 impact shell IMPACT SHELL FULL.”
• It’s one thing to have a unique control mechanism that is slightly quirky and unpredictable for your first game in the series. By the time you get to the fourth installment, you should really prevent the button for “use the hookblade to swing up a building really fast” resulting in “wall jump backwards from the tallest building in the game and go flying into the void”.
• The god damn bug where parachutes randomly disappear is still fucking present. You buy fifteen parachutes, do some missions, and when you come back, try and jump off a building before noticing your parachute counter is at zero.
• It's worth your time to read what Corvus had to say about the game as well

Arkham City Map App

One of the interesting things about Arkham City is the $3 iPad app that lets you know where Riddler Trophies are. Collectibles are an interesting topic and there are a lot of great essays covering what makes for good and bad collectibles, but what’s interesting about Arkham City and the companion app is the gaping hole between games and their companion pieces.

There are about 400 trophies scattered across Arkham City. In the game, you can either scan in existing trophies to record their location, or take out green-colored bad guys in order to wring the information from their mouths onto your map. However, location is not enough - each trophy might have a puzzle or a required gadget associated with it (Catwoman has her own set of trophies which only she can collect), and so the OFFICIAL Batman: Arkham City Map App (OB:ACMA?) gives you a touch-screen interface where you can tap the riddle and get a screenshot and some text purportedly containing the solution to the riddle. Of course, there are some complications.

Let’s say you’re like me, and you’re easily pressured into finishing the main plot, but along the way you manage to scoop up a healthy serving of easily-solved riddles and trophies. Ten hours in, you finish the main plot, and start looking at how many effing trophies there are. From the accumulated scans and interrogations, you have a pretty good idea on how to start up but every five to ten trophies you get stuck, or you can’t find the thing, or whatever. You could walk to the other room, get on your preferred search engine, and start searching for terms like “arkham city bowery riddler trophies” (hah! Good fucking luck finding the one you mean!), or you could try and find sites that give reasonable and complete solutions while cross-referencing that with other sites and their maps, or you can just spend the measly three extra dollars on a really good game with really good puzzles. So you do, and you open the app, and oh my god the entire map is covered with riddle icons.

There are a few ways to proceed. You can either try and eyeball the solution and the screenshot to see if you remember getting a particular trophy so you can mark it complete. This is risky - a lot of solutions are very similar, and locations are hard to discern, so you might get a false positive. Plus, it takes a long time (four hundred trophies, and about five seconds to click a riddle, look at it, and mark it done or not). Or, you can go back in time, start playing with the app in hand, and mark every. single. trophy. as you receive it. This means constantly dropping in and out of the game, double checking your location on the map, and going through that five-second process four hundred times--just spread out from minute 1, when you might care more about other things (like enjoying the new game you’re just getting used to). Or, you can try the pragmatic approach: interrogate a few thugs until you have a reasonably complete map, and just approximate your location against the OB:ACMA when you get stuck on a tough one. This is what I did. I am missing exactly two trophies.

There is a better way.

The Xbox Companion app for the phone will eventually allow you to control your console from your phone. This isn’t completely a new idea. It’s just a specialized form of remotely accessing a machine which has been around since basically forever, but for some reason this is the first big shot in the “three screens” war. The premise of “three screens” is that we have information we access in 3 ways: smartphones, televisions, computer monitors. Right now those three are fairly isolated from each other. Although it’s possible to have a media PC that outputs to a TV screen, or a smartphone app that remotes to your computer, it’s generally pretty rare and/or clunky.

What technical limitations prevent an iPad app from talking to an Xbox game to figure out what trophies you’ve already collected? Xbox games are free to talk to the Internet - Ubisoft already has a proof of concept for this, and Burnout: Paradise allows you to upload a PS3 save file to see what you’re missing. I can imagine it adds a fair amount of work to the game in development, but a read-only API doesn’t require much in terms of assets or voice work. Costs could be more or less recouped with official map apps that actually track your progress. It would keep people playing your games longer, blah blah blah, monetization strategy, synergistic transmedia experience, etc.

Of course, I’d like to take this one step further, right into Crystal Chronicles territory. How come me and my six poker buddies can’t sit in front of an Xbox and have the pot and buttons and community cards on the television while our pocket cards are sent to our smartphones? How come when “the” Age of Empires Online app is finally published to Windows Phone 7, it’s just a list of recipes I can make instead of a tool to let me craft those recipes during my bus commute?

There is wasted potential here. The technology exists, and I’m pretty sure there’s a market for it as well. It just hasn’t been touched - at all.

I dig a hole, you build a wall

Bastion was the first game for this year’s Summer of the Arcade on Xbox Live. I love Summer of the Arcade - previous years have brought us Limbo and Braid, as well as Shadow Complex and Castle Crashers. Like all those titles, Bastion has become one of my favorite games of the year.

I will now take a second to politely inform you that major spoilers for Bastion follow. It’s a new game and the ending has become one of my favorite endings, so be warned that I am about to discuss the glorious ending in all its wonderful detail. If you haven’t finished the game yet, I’d suggest not continuing much further!

One of the great things about Bastion is the structure. On its surface the plot is a traditional “find the four magic MacGuffins”. If you played the game with the volume muted and subtitles turned off you could have a lot of fun, but it would be just another RPG. The combat is smooth thanks to a very agile roll that lets you dodge and pop up behind an enemy. The weapons are responsive and distinct with plenty of room to upgrade and customize them, and you have lots of control over difficulty beyond a simple Easy/Medium/Hard selection. The narration and music serves up so much, though, that it completely transforms the game.

You start off alone in a literally-broken world, with a disembodied voice narrating your actions. As you proceed, you find a trinket belonging to a lady-friend, implying she did not survive. Shortly after, you find the source of the voice. Another human! You are not alone after all! As you continue to travel, other people’s survival is hinted at: as one level collapses, the Narrator implies another human must have grabbed the MacGuffin. This implication is untrue in this case, but shortly afterwards you discover Zulf in The Gardens, where you must slip through winding alleys full of corpses embalmed in stone. The Narrator reads off the names of each of the deceased and a short sentence about what kind of people they were. This is another humanizing touch. It constructs a world and places Rucks and The Kid in it in relation to other people. Even smashing each statue to bits gives The Narrator a chance explain The Kid’s actions in relation to the world around him; in this case, anger and remorse that these people are gone and can never come back, even if their statues remained intact.

Finding Zia is even more heart-wrenching. The level’s music is nothing more than a looped melody in a minor key with some daunting lyrics (“One day that wall is gonna fall”), yet also some resolute and hopeful lyrics (“build that city on a hill”). The lyrics match the game’s motifs. The Shifting Walls are where The Kid starts the game, destroyed utterly by the Calamity, and The Bastion is being rebuilt by The Kid. As you return to the Bastion with Zia, the narrator even quotes the song back at her, “We’ll be there before too long”.

The Singer’s Song

This is all the first half of the game, which establishes the previous world and The Kid’s connections to it, giving the player plenty of opportunity to realize the human aspects of the story. Most games are content to just put a ruined building up and an audio clip or codex entry saying how sad it is, but Bastion gives a name and a face to almost every one of the dead you meet here. The few people you meet are never the ones you want to see (you can ask Zulf and Zia about the woman’s hairclip you found - the answers are not optimistic), but they are so sparse and important that you’re glad to see them anyway.

The second half of the game changes tone with the discovery of the Calamity’s origin. The Narrator doesn’t focus on human cost; he develops a steely edge as you leave the city and explore The Wilds. He draws comparisons between animals seeking MacGuffin #2 and the residents of Bastion about how both are just trying to survive, gathering around MacGuffins for comfort, and then says that the animals have to go if they stand between us and survival.

Or the penultimate act, where you track down the Ulra. Humans! Who exist! Remember how exciting that was in the first half of the game? Well, now you have to kill them. All of them. Rucks explicitly says it’s time for you to finish “what the Calamity started”, i.e. genocide. The game spends so much time building up the human aspect of this world, but Zulf’s discovery of the Calamity’s purpose looks at the inverted side of that equation. Humans are important and lovely and wonderful and we miss them when they’re gone, but they’re also scheming, paranoid, jealous, greedy warmongers. Now you are personally forced to put “vengeful” on that list too, otherwise you can’t turn back time to prevent the Calamity. As the player, I actually felt heartbroken about each and every Ulra I had to put down even as I felt compelled to keep going.

In the final level, this conflict comes to a head when you can either forgive Zulf or abandon him. To forgive him means to stop perpetrating the cycle of violence. To abandon him means keeping yourself armed and well-protected against the people who attacked you. I haven’t finished my second playthrough yet, but I chose to forgive. I picked up Zulf’s body and dragged him back to Bastion.

As you do, the Ulra continue attacking you while this song plays – calling back to Zia’s song, but altering it heavily to reflect the tension:

The End song. I don’t know the title.

The game mechanics are slightly modified at this point. The health bar and health potion trackers are gone, although the screen still flashes and fades out when you take damage, and the “Press Y to heal!” tip comes up above The Kid’s head. This makes you feel besieged, anxious and helpless as you can’t retaliate when carrying Zulf, although why would you, now that you’ve chosen forgiveness? Yet the lack of explicit indicators implies the exact number of health potions you have is no longer important, encouraging you to use as many as you need in order to survive as long as possible. The payoff is when the Ulra finally understand what you’re doing and stop attacking, silently watching as you prove the fighting is finally over. Now it’s time to see if you will restart the cycle, or embrace this broken, but promising new world.

nb: I’d be out of my mind if I didn’t give a shoutout to my blogger buddies who served as a sounding board for my opinions on this awesome game. So thanks Brendan and Kris who both came into my self-serving G+ thread to talk about their impressions of the game.

Dragon Age and Baldur’s Gate

Here is the primary difference between the Baldur’s Gate series and the Dragon Age series:

Most people quit Baldur’s Gate after 20 minutes, when they are killed by wolves after walking out the front gate. Baldur’s Gate used the full range of game mechanics to build a world, and that included making your first death nearly inevitable as a learning experience. The people who quit Dragon Age did so because the prologue never ends.

Here’s why that primary difference is so important to Baldur’s Gate: after bandying about in the world for a significant period of time, growing stronger and gaining party members,  you might encounter some of the wolves who gave you Death #1 (or Near-Death #1)--and you beat the shit out of them in seconds. They're not a threat anymore. Your growth is clear and evident. Is the conquering-what-once-conquered-you method primitive in terms of emotional engagement? Sure! It's a method using the narrative of games; “you died, try again” (aka losing) is the most familiar element of a game, and Baldur’s Gate is sure to teach you this lesson early. Is this mechanic user-friendly? Not as implemented, although low-level D&D is a crapshoot to begin with, but it's certainly possible to make death less frustrating through judicious use of auto-saves, fast reload times, and/or a "rewind" function  (god bless the PSP’s Tactics Ogre for this function, by the way).

Baldur's Gate used game mechanics to 1) show you the world is a big, unfriendly place and 2) make you feel powerful after a long progression of incremental progress. Furthermore, an important part of Baldur's Gate’s expansive  and hostile world is the constant reminder of being underpowered - nothing’s more demoralizing than stumbling on a Lich’s tomb and getting wiped out after a single Time Stop spell - but once you’re more powerful, you can return and wipe the Lich out and claim his useful stash of weapons and spells. It's an emotional roller coaster, which keeps you engaged in short bursts across the sixty hours it takes to complete the game.

It's also reflected within the central conflict of the plot, which is (GENTLE REMINDER THAT SPOILERS FOR A TEN-YEAR-OLD GAME ARE INCOMING. I HOPE THIS DOESN'T OFFEND YOUR DELICATE SENSIBILITIES) the revelation that the player character is one of the offspring of Baal, a God of Murder And Stuff. Which grants a shitload of Power, which the sequel’s Big Bad, Jon Irenicus,  wants to corner the market on (specifically, the Murder Market, and specifically by utilizing the act of Murder, multiple times, until no competitors are left). The PC hunts down other Baalspawn, and later Jon, across multiple realms while struggling to control/go completely fucking bonkers with his own infusion of Power. So yeah, it's a D&D plot, not exactly subtle, with the expected levels of thematic density (none) and emotional resonance (marginal), and yet, the theme of "power" is constantly reinforced by both the plot and the game’s mechanics.

With Dragon Age 2, as you progress from poor disenfranchised slug to Champion of the City and engage in an open three-way power struggle with the SeriouslyRealChristianity church and the We’reNotTerroristsWe’reModerateMagicians mages, your enemies are--from the beginning of the game until the end--the same mix of ogres, darkspawn, and human/quasi-human beings. Who look exactly identical. And take nearly the same amount of time to kill.

I would love to say that Dragon Age 2's plots are about the Futility of War, but unfortunately while DA2 is a bold move away from The Bioware Plot, it is Not A Plot. It's a series of vignettes that tie in with each other, but not necessarily with the player's emotional state while playing the game or with the combat mechanics (i.e., using magic in front of Templars has no in-game consequences, compared to BG 2 where the use of magic in-city got you Effed Up right quick). Progression means something that gets you the next cutscene, not something that makes you feel like you’re systematically mastering combat.

I think it says a lot that DA2’s only skill check comes in the form of locked chests, whose contents are hilariously worthless--because giving powerful items to the small subset of players who can pass the skill check might mean the game isn't balanced! You might become too efficient at killing ogres and darkspawn, and the facade would crumble.

TL;DR: In Baldur's Gate, when you first encounter wolves, they will kill you and you will have to reload from a save that you almost certainly didn't make. When you see wolves later, you kill them mega-fast and feel great. In Dragon Age 2, when you first encounter an ogre, it kills your sibling in a cut-scene and then you kill it. When you see ogres half a dozen times later, it takes the same exact amount of time to kill it--every time.

roadblocks

one of the problems I have with with writing primarily about videogames is that I occasionally enter into dry spells, in which I play plenty of triple-A releases but find nothing noteworthy to say about any of them. unlike books, or music, or (sigh) movies, it seems possible to consume an inordinate amount of media but come up with stuff that's either too saccharine or shit to inspire any neural activity. I think there's also a bit of bias on my part to focus on newer games so I can stay on top of "community" discussions, since that seems to be the easiest way to participate in actual conversations instead of me sitting here stroking out my latest discursion on Nietzschean philosophy as embodied by Mega Man X (SNES).

so here's a hack in the form of a playjournal while I suffer through the winter, waiting for something to revitalize my spirit.

Enslaved was shit, but Abbot covers that pretty thoroughly – I would only add that the gameplay was shit, the level design was shit, and all of the interesting elements of the plot went completely ignored.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is a fun sequel to the series, although the trademark idiot-dialogue still exists:

KRADEN: "We need to go now!"

EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN YOUR PARTY, ONE AT A TIME:

":0" :0" ":o" ":o" ":(" ":("

EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN YOUR PARTY, ONE AT A TIME:

":)" ":)" ":|" ":)" ":)" ":)" ":)"

KRADEN: ":)"

KRADEN: "Okay, let's go!"

but like most of the other flaws (too short, near-literal cliffhanger ending with no resolution to the plot, not nearly enough boss battles, 90% of the "puzzles" require no thought, 5% are trivial, and 1% are inscrutable) it's glossed over by the fact that it's a jRPG that doesn't punish the players for daring to play it (SAVE ANYWHERE, HOLY SHIT) and thus is automatically deemed "must-have for genre fans" in my book – although curiously it seems to have received no hype and no buzz (either because Nintendo feels the brand name must carry itself, or because the game is being marketed towards 9-year-olds, as the GameStop clerk did not hesitate to tell me when I asked if he heard anything about its quality)

I also started World of Warcraft. Like Golden Sun, it's solidly saccharine. There's no text to go on unless you seriously invest out-of-game time in the fan Wiki (no in-game codex for whatever reason). The mechanics are scary-good since you are always aware that time is your primary resource (and, unlike Farmville, something you are literally required to pay for!) but you still feel compelled to play for just one more [quest/crafting tier/dungeon/level/achievement/etc.]. The pay-to-play thing makes it feel much more like a slot machine to me than Farmville, but then again I've never really understood why Farmville gets all the vitriol while WoW is a gaming icon.

AC: Brotherhood & Project Legacy

Look yes I know, the whole Assassin’s Creed future-plot setup is kind of silly. The “aliens gave us the Apple of Eden” crypto-Truth bullshit is just embarrassing. The Borgia family, though… They had history. Not a codex entry, not an expository cutscene, not a hundred NPCs saying “oh look the Citadel is big and important, look how big and important it is [it is big and important]”, but actual literal history. Yeah okay you probably won’t see the PBS documentary explaining that the Borgia killed Ezio’s uncle or whatever – but that doesn’t undercut the sheer menace of your love interest being held in the Papal prison, or the hilariously overwrought bacchanalia of the collapsing church in the fifteenth century. So if the future-plot seems weak, it’s mostly in contrast to the incredibly strong feeling of historical significance you get from exploring Ezio’s memories.

The historical background also plays off AC’s other core strength contained within the titular Creed: “Nothing is true / everything is permitted”. A lot of the bad guys in the game are bad, sure – plotters, betrayers, incest…ualizers?, and, uh… hypocrites. But you’re a fucking remorseless serial murderer. The future-plot gets a little weaker here, because you don’t really witness Templars acting evil – you just get told over and over how evil they are. But the historical context gives you a lot more motivation in the past-plot – fuck yeah I want to pounce on some Crusaders from above in Jerusalem. Shit just feels right. Hell yes I want to stealthily take out corrupt Church officials at their own orgy. Dudes painted children in gold, like across their entire bodies, until the kids just up and died from the poisonous effects. Future-plot “Templar agents” are launching “a satellite” and use “cell phone radar” to track me? Sure. Whatever. Can I get back to infiltrating the Vatican so I can murder the Pope?

Yes the plot is all an elaborate conspiracy theory - but the actors have emotion, and reasons, and justifications. unlike The Collectors or The Reapers or The Sith or The Darkspawn, who are a threat because of numbers or magic plot-powers you never get to witness, the Borgia aren’t a threat to the world. they’re an annoyance. You don’t act out of some abortive sense of duty – you act out of revenge, and then convenience, and then just because the dude is a incestuous prick who went from tears to full-throated rage when his uncle cut off his funds (god, I love hearing Cesare’s voice break with anger and grief and fear as he demands money and recognition). The writing emphasizes these are all people, who have motivation, who need to react and compete against each other and not just you.  if we as gamers are starting  to push back against the idea that ludonarrative dissonance is a necessary condition of gameplay*, it’s because we’re starting to see that the player character doesn’t always have to be at the center of each and every drama. the player character can just as easily be a bit character hanging off a ledge watching this unfold. it’s no less engrossing that way, and a wonderful change of pace.**

*Not actually a part of the original ludonarrative dissonance critique, but it’s certainly been interpreted to be a necessary part of a game.

** and actually AC is a little weird if you’re talking about ludonarrative because the core of the game is actually a stated simulation via the Animus. So if you try to do something against the narrative – say, kill a civilian – the Animus says “hey, Ezio didn’t do that originally, be careful or you’ll get desync’d and have to start over”. So the entire past-plot exists in the context of reliving memories and if you deviate from that path (by dying, by failing missions, etc) there’s this very neat corrective system that says “oh that’s not how it happened”. essentially you have this additional layer of abstraction to mitigate the player’s natural impulses to fuck around with the rules of the open world against the desires of the story. Is another layer of indirection the only way to counter LND? …time will tell!

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Of course, it’s a love-hate relationship with this franchise. Ubisoft, for all its brilliance in game design, still has some serious software design issues – the map is a pain in the ass when you need to see elevation clearly, there’s no way of knowing you need to turn in feathers,  and the assassin missions are more of a chore to organize than anything else (Why are missions organized by region – a useless abstraction with no consequence – when I always want to see missions organized by difficulty?).

There’s a bit of irony here, actually. I’ve seen a few complaints about the “Facebook” nature of the assassin missions. Yet the review didn’t mention there is an actual Facebook game, probably because the facebook game has terrible design. I’ll concede that gameplay mechanics in a Facebook game are historically not very rich, but the interface design is required to be top-notch in order to make success a possibility. Ubisoft’s bungling of the Facebook game is almost entirely because they seem reluctant to engage with actual software design. [For example: unbearably slow loads, not being able to differentiate between different collectables, not being able to see all the requirements a mission has before entering the mission, the hellish and nearly-impossible and undocumented process of linking your uPlay to your Facebook profile to your actual instance of AC:Brotherhood – with exception of the last, all problems that have been long solved by Zynga &c.] And so Project Legacy’s failings mirror Brotherhood’s failings. The feature list is there, but the implementation is senseless, which speaks to a to lack in playtesting/QA.

The worst part about Project Legacy is the brush with greatness. If I could actually organize the accused “facebook-style” assassination missions through Legacy instead of doling out a measly 75 exp every 4 hours, I would have spent a lot more time and care on it. As it stands, I played through a few rounds and promptly forgot about it. It’s a mediocre tie-in, but the richness of interaction is possible – we have a facebook game sending data to an Xbox game*! In near-real time! The next step is being able to play a continuous game session regardless if you’re on a computer, xbox, or (probably Windows 7) phone, where each platform uses its strengths to create a rich, living, interactive environment that you can pick up whenever you need to scratch the itch.

 

*This connection is through a third-party connection service, uPlay, which like EA’s 3rd party server service is a huge pain in the ass that everyone hates having to deal with (forcing users to create yet another account with yet another password is such a terrible idea). I suspect that the 3rd party service is probably a necessary condition for arbitrary data connections & persistence since xbl does not explicitly provide that service, although obviously I have no idea if this is true or not. 

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a few more notes on brotherhood since I love this series obsessively: I’m holding out hope the 3rd game will take place in World War I. Great setting, and, you know – it was triggered by an assassination. I’ll take any non-American historical turmoil, though – French Revolution? The Bolsheviks Revolution? The Boxer Rebellion? All great settings that have been completely untouched by games (except for some dense historical sims).

The ending was the LEAST bullshit ending in an AC game – previously the PoE bullshit came out of nowhere for a ridiculous and unintentionally campy boss fight in the first game, and in the second game the fisticuffs with the Pope leading to space alien creation myth bullshit was just too much – the Truth video was even worse. In Brotherhood, at least dialogue in the credits made returning to the animus complete creepy in a way that nicely mirrors how freaked out I am by the bleeding effect (Which, by the way, completely justifies the entire animus future-plot setup. The first time it happened I actually freaked out and instinctually tried to fight ghost-guards).

The Cristina missions were lovely. Perfect, even. The romance was real – more real than awkwardly seducing a crewmate in Mass Effect – the tension & pathos were affecting, and I love love love that it was triggered by standing next to a very certain type of woman. I love that the explanation was that these were repressed memories. I love that they were completely straightfoward – a lot of side missions feel the need to include lots of worthless combat for no reason, but here it was clean and fast.

The Truth was a fucking copout this time. At least last time we got something. This time we got an abstract “puzzle” lair and a short, nonsensical conversation. The puzzles were worse, too – especially when it named Justice Roberts as a templar because of the Citizens United case. It’s the laziest sort of critique, and violates a key tenet of conspiracy theories – never make a falsifiable assertion.

low stakes

As promised, more on Fable 3 – this time tracking closer to Mr Wasteland and Brainy Gamer’s conversations.

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Assuming we’re all gamers here – we’ve all faced moral “dilemmas” in games. In Dragon Age, we can sell elves into slavery for profit! In Mass Effect, we can choose to save dangerous space aliens at our own risk! In Mass Effect 2, we can choose to save dangerous space aliens at our own risk!

Those decisions are barely more complicated than choosing if you should save up money for your future or stab your parents to get your inheritance now. Instead of true dilemmas where you have to negotiate a delicate moral balance between following your principles or making sacrifices to fight another day, you’re more often left with the choice between:

(1) Do something that breaks social taboos or violates common sense for immediate benefit, with a murky chance of repercussions that won’t end your game outright

(2) Do something good for no immediate benefit, with a slightly higher chance you’ll be rewarded in other ways (Exp, alignment points, etc. ).

Or:

(1) Do something hilariously evil for no purpose for minor gain and with no negative impact whatsoever

(2) Do something moderately-to-hilariously ambiguous-to-benevolent in order to avoid option (1).

And it’s always weighty. It’s always, fate-of-the-world-is-in-your-hands, do-these-civilians-live-or-die.

Fable 3 threw me for a loop by giving me chickens.

At the end of the Chicken Chaser quest, you get a lengthy and hilarious debate between a farmer and his wife about the fate of the runaway chickens (“They could have destroyed the town! Possibly the world!”), ending with the farmer pleading: “You’ve lived among them. You’ve seen their ways. You decide what to do”.

Your options are:

(1) Kill the chickens.

(2) Save the chickens.

Also, this entire time, you’re wearing a chicken suit. Completely absurd. Over-the-top ridiculous.

And I was stuck.

Let the chickens live cooped up, occasionally breaking out and threatening the civilian populace (Well… probably threatening them. They did cluck out a marching song as I led them back, and that’s clear militarism) – or kill the chickens and let the villagers have some peace of mind?

After all, killing chickens isn’t really “evil”. It doesn’t bump up against my moral boundaries. In fact, I do it all the time. I had chicken fingers this week, as well as chicken breast, and chicken stock, and even some eggs!  And this early in the game, I wasn’t committed to a particular ideology. So I stared at the screen and thought about how to choose between mercy-killing and stuffing chickens into captivity.

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Fable 3 handed me a choice that was inconsequential, but completely critical to how I would play the rest of the game. It ended up being the point at which I chose the alignment I would keep for the rest of the game. If it were elves in those cages, it would have been a completely different situation – the moral choice would have been stark and quickly decidable . Low-stakes, absurdist humor was able to get my attention, and create an ambiguous moral situation in a way heavy “evil enemy is amassing on the horizon” setups couldn’t. 

high stakes

I want to talk about some of the successes and failures of Fable 3, both from an interface design perspective and a game design perspective. Since this post got long enough, right now I’ll focus on the interface choices and next time I’ll look at the game itself. Before that can happen, we need to establish a few baselines.

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Let’s say you’re in Microsoft’s position. You’re facing severe competition from the Wii. Even the Playstation3 has some degree of motion control. What’s to be done?

You can’t just mimic the Wii. First, you’ll never catch up to the wild success of Wii Sports. Second, you can’t fragment the controller tech you already spent years training developers and users on, by introducing a whole new schema. Finally, mimicry is already Sony’s game with the Move. You have to differentiate yourself, you have to take it to the next level. Motion control? Fuck that, body control. Regardless of how it works out, whether the technology has merit - it’s objectively the only business decision you can justify.

Now imagine you’re trying to redesign the RPG,  a genre famous for its menus upon menus. EA tried it with Mass Effect 2– removing the loot for which the genre is known, streamlining the entire process down to a few skill points and rarely-changing weapons loadouts. ME2’s fatal flaw, though, was trading poorly-organized information for virtually no information (just try and tell me how you were supposed  to realize one weapon was ‘better’ than another in the loadout screen).

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I think that if your mission is to redesign the RPG, something Molyneux has long held as a goal, you don’t have a lot of choices but to try something big, and bold, and something that will more likely than not fail. It’s not “innovation” if it’s not a risk!

I think Corvus is largely correct that Fable 3’s design decisions were influenced by the up-and-coming Kinect (The press-and-hold-ring gesture is a dead giveaway when you compare it to the hold-your-hand-ring on the Kinect Hub).  The other part of this puzzle is the “natural UI” movement (Bill Braxton of Microsoft Research describes it in practice here – it’s something more easily explained in video than text, by definition). Kinect is, of course, one part of this movement. Fable 3 is also attempting to be part of this movement above and beyond some rumored Kinect integration.

Of course, there are plenty of criticisms to make w/r/t the design choices. Again, Corvus is correct that menus are largely remapped to 3d space. I don’t think this is an incorrect decision – the speed with which you can get to the sanctuary screen, and the d-pad shortcuts prevent this from being an undue burden. Seeing your wardrobe choices organized on mannequins is certainly better than seeing “Left Auroran Men’s Glove, Right Auroran Men’s Glove, Auroran Men’s Pants (Red)” on a menu screen (I haven’t played Fable 2 – I have no idea how it handled this situation).  The singular flaw in implementation is limiting how much shit you can see and interact with at a time.

“Natural UI” doesn’t mean “literally the same motions you would make in real life”, it means “using a metaphor the user is familiar with to make things more convenient”. A wardrobe for clothes is perfect! A weapons rack is perfect! Limiting your entire interaction with a weapons rack to “look at each weapon one-by-one”? Not only is it a pain in the ass, but it ignores the entire purpose of going to the weapons rack – to compare things you own side-by-side. To quickly see what progress you’re making on your upgrades. To check out new items at a glance and look at all the cool shit you own at once. That’s a lot of information you need to see, which the interface isn’t providing for. For all that screen space available, you can’t see two or three-level displays stacked on top of each other? You can’t compare two weapons side by side? Regardless of high aspirations, that’s poor design.

super meat boy & signalling

if we're going to talk about games as software then yeah, super meat boy is exceptional. it's very obvious the team had a clear vision about what they wanted to do. It's designed from the bottom up to be a platformer. Not a platformer-RPG,  not a puzzle-platformer, not a monochrome-with-sad-piano-music-platformer. Just a platformer.

The team also had a wonderful idea of how to do it. The controls lend themselves well to muscle-memory, so once you figure out a tricky bit you can blow past it next time. When you die, you respawn before you can even think about throwing your controller across the room. When you finally beat a level, the tiny parade of failed attempts lets you laugh at your failures and celebrate your eventual success. Wonderful design! Brilliant design! 

You can’t play Super Meat Boy without the knowledge that this is supposed to be a “true” platformer, a “hardcore” title. Ten or fifteen years ago, there was no “hardcore vs. casual”. There was “RPG vs FPS”, there was “PC vs Console”, and maybe there was “I beat it on easy with cheats vs I beat it on HARD”, but there were no Facebook games to rage against. There weren’t Bejeweled clones to sniff at.

No pandering here.

Super Meat Boy is an homage to a different time, sure. A natural extension of that homage is the signaling contained within the game. The game itself, as a response to “casual” games, seems to be a shot across the bow – true gamers are still here. We are still a force in the marketplace.  This isn’t a game for Halo or Call of Duty meatheads / bros. This is a game for people who grew up in the SNES era – demonstrated by the warp worlds which gave you everything from Atari 8-bit to Genesis 16-bit callbacks. And this is definitely not a game for the Farmville crowd, demonstrated by the fact that your character is a disgusting ball of meat that leaves a blood trail, navigating piles of needles and rivers of – you guessed it! – blood.

I mean the game starts off with the female character getting punched, in the face, repeatedly, by her kidnapper. Even if you ignore the "it's humorous to depict women getting beaten and aren't you the real sexist for even bringing it up" element (Up next: T-shirts saying "Robotic fetus abuse survivor"?), there’s a pretty clear underlying signal here: This game is By Us, For Us. This game is Part Of The Club of True Hardcore Gamers. The unlockable characters are probably shit you’ve never even heard of, unless you happen to know Mighty Jill-Off, Gish, and Bit.Trip. At minimum.

There’s nothing wrong with a little in-crowd nudging. There’s nothing wrong with calling out other authors who you have respect for. And, to be clear, there’s not anything wrong with making a platformer designed to be difficult. But when you make a game that calls back to 1996 in 2010, I can’t help but think of what’s changed in that time. This is a personal preference, not a reflection on the quality of the game – but I’ve played platformers from 1996 quite extensively. I look forward to something new, not a rehash of the old. Apparently that makes me quite unique in the hardcore gaming sphere.

Comparing interfaces

 

It seems impossible to criticize design without seeming like you are nitpicking. Obviously the entire issue of design is one of small nitpicks that pile up – for every small decision made, especially in a computer system, someone said “Well, this should behave in this way”. Good design guides these small choices. Bad design might “ship the org chart”, or more commonly, fail to provide any guidance at all.

Let’s talk about the Xbox360, and the PS3. They’re both pretty mature at this point, they can handle it. I’m leaving the Wii off these discussions since its iPhone interface is pretty boring to me – it’s well executed, simple, and neither flawed nor innovative in any instructive way.

The scenario in our apartment is “no autologin” since the gf and I share both consoles, so let’s look at the just-turned-on experience (sorry for the dubious quality photos):

Both screens are trying to solve the same problems: Trophies/achievements, online stores, and friends lists require a user to be logged in even for playing a game. The PS3 chooses not to show you what capabilities it has until you login, where the Xbox shows you what’s possible, what game is in the tray, and defers forcing logon until the user actively chooses to do something.

You can also see some of the basic design aesthetics at work: Sony is no-frills. Xbox is colorful and uses a whole bunch of visual tricks to give you an intuitive look at what elements are movable – the faded type, the use of depth to stack tiles in the background, and always the legend at the bottom to tell you exactly what buttons do what. See that at the bottom of the PS3’s screen? Of course not. Sony expects you to know “X” means “accept” and “O” means “cancel”.

Now logged in:

 

This is a fairer picture of  Sony’s interface. Aside from the use of vertical and horizontal space, there are gorgeous custom overlays for every game - when you’re on the game “blade”.  The game icon is also animated to give you a few action shots. The interface for Xbox doesn’t change too much when you login – it’s consistent with the logged-out experience. Game icons can’t be animated on the Xbox, and custom themes are generally something you have to purchase. However, there are a few gripes I want to share about the PS3 screen:

• If you look closely, you will see that Flower is on my games blade twice – once in a little capsule that is just the downloaded file I got from the Marketplace, one is the actual way to launch the game. Duplicated information is pretty sloppy, especially when you’re first using the interface and you have no way of knowing which is which.
• On the “top” of the blade (Above the horizontal line of parallel blades) is a bunch of meaningless stuff about save files and import utilities. What? Xbox puts these in the “Memory” section of My Xbox –> Settings, which seems a little bit more logical. Why do these utilities exist here? Some of them are related to the PS2 – but my playstation can’t play PS2 games! (This will lead into a digression later)
• Xbox uses the top right corner to show my avatar, gamertag & gamerscore. Sony uses it to scroll ads, which I never read.
• And finally, most egregiously - THE ICONS HAVE LOAD TIMES. LOLWTF. I consistently get 2sec of load times on the fucking icons? Look, human perception is a capricious thing. The absolute boundary of our perception is about 1/10th of a second. 1 second is noticeable. 3 seconds is perceived as very noticeable, to the point of distraction (5 seconds is boredom, 10 seconds is the limit at which you switch tasks – in case you were curious). But for a primary input on a common function… Could you imagine if your mouse took 2 seconds to register every click, or your keyboard had a 2-second delay on every stroke? Plus, you know, they’re fucking ICONS! You’re telling me the PS3 couldn’t spend the 6 kilobytes of memory to keep that speedy?  It drives me up a damn wall because anyone with any expertise in user experience or interface knows those perception limits off the top of their head – to ship a flagship console with that problem? I can launch a damn web browser faster than I can select “Play Game” on a gaming console.

Still, despite these gripes  - at first glance, the two interfaces don’t look that different. How many ways can you make an navigation pane? There’s a horizontal element, and a vertical element. When I said the PS3 was “no-frills”, though, I wasn’t kidding. Its dominant metaphor is pretty clear:

Yeah.

By the numbers: 10 icons when the PlayStation is online (The PSN icon is not shown when the console is offline, as above; Xbox has 9 blades, with 1 being quite simple to disable). Sixteen menu options under “settings”. My particular PS3 has thirteen menu options under “games” (Xbox has 9…ish under “My Xbox”, which is the biggest category).  And of those sixteen menu settings, all of them are hiding 5-6 individual settings beneath that single category. So the PS3 interface is hitting the same problems as the old Office interface. 

Here’s the 360 settings screen in comparison:

Okay, still a ton of options hidden in these menus. But there’s text stating exactly what settings are contained within, which I think the PS3 needs pretty badly after I spent too much time hunting for specific options.  And the settings are organized in much more concise categories.

Editing a profile:

Yeah, good luck trying to figure out what you’re editing in the PS3 screen. And look – my achievement icons are fucking loading. And every time you enter this screen, you have to sit through a progress bar as “trophies are syncing”.  Don’t bother trying to figure out what exact trophies you have from this screen, or how you got them– you need to exit out completely and go back to the Games menu and find “Trophies” sandwiched in between the twelve other icons.  Absolutely terrible interface here on the PS3’s part, while Xbox is concise. Also, speaking of trophies:

See that little toast? If I hit the center jewel on my controller (it looks exactly like the icon on the toast!) , it pulls up my friends screen to show me who just logged on! If I hit it when an achievement pops, it shows me the achievement I just popped! If I hit it normally, it pauses the game I’m playing and brings up  an extremely compressed interface that gives me a very efficient overview of what things I can do:

Here’s the PS3’s “jewel screen” when a trophy pops, a friend logs on, or whatever else is going on:

As with a lot of my other criticisms of the PS3 – it’s not really a flaw in the interface. Showing the same menu screen is consistent(although this triggers the god-damn loading icons). It’s just the Xbox experience seems really well thought out: “When a user sees a new achievement, they will probably want to know what it’s for”, “When a friend logs on, the user might want to interact with their friend” , “When the user is in the middle of a game, they might want a compact, lightweight interface”. In contrast, the PS3 interface doesn’t really seem “designed” as much as “plopped down into place” – when apologists say it has a “functional design”, they mean “it has some functions and it shows you what those functions are”.