There are some ways in which I envy developers: the money, the fame, the adulation. Mostly the money, though. However having the power to create worlds in which players can get lost for hours is a tempting prospect. Being a writer affords you a little of that, but there’s something mesmerising about how a good game can worm its way into your mind and you find yourself thinking about it at odd times*. A funeral somewhere has to have been inappropriately interrupted by some derp shouting, “Shit! That’s how you kill Crawmerax!”
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
No comments:
Post a Comment