I recently completed Wasteland 2 Director’s Cut and had a blast with it. But with the recent Fallout: New Vegas DRM-free re-release on GOG it made me think about something that felt missing from quite a few RPGs of recent years, something that was so common in both jRPGs and cRPGs that it was arguably one of the minor defining features of the genre – the overworld map.
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How many times have we saved planets, worlds, universes and all of their inhabitants, or watched them die, when something goes wrong? You’d think, we will get so used to it, we shouldn’t even care and just go through motions with every storyline like that. Yet still there’s a game from time to time which has familiar character personalities and storylines but makes us care about them, live with them, believe in them and love them. A game which understands, that it needs to motivate the player to do all that. Which knows, that it’s not enough to just assume that the player will just start caring on his/her own.
I have noticed this thing a lot, but recent Max Payne 3 became the last straw and I can’t stay silent about this issue anymore. I don’t understand, why exactly so many developers force their “great cinematic moments” in our mouth, completely ignoring the magic the player creates while simply playing the game. Why do they doubt the power of the medium they create in?
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Not there! Run on the wall! Not up the wall, along it! Why the fuck have you not grabbed it?! Left! Left, you shit!!Welcome to the world of acrobatic action adventure and platforming games of the last 10 years, baby.
![Геймдизайн Глазами Геймера, [Анти]социальный гейминг, Gamer talk on game design, [Anti-]Social gaming](http://klardendum.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/antisocialgaming.jpg "antisocialgaming")
Social networks, online games, multiplayer became everyday life for many. Internet is readily available and is easier to get into than ever before. Nokia isn’t “connecting people” anymore (give it’s financial state, it’s barely doing anything anymore -_-), the internet does. And old jokes about connecting via a fridge aren’t even jokes anymore. And game developers know that.
Games that don’t have any online elements look weird today and tend to be less popular than those that do, even if they are outright better. Even the popularity of a game like Amnesia, which isn’t selling as good as it deserves, is far more popular than it could be due to online – people are doing the “scarecams”, reacting in fear to the game and it’s very popular. Also the Steam sales are helping and Steam today is very much a gaming social network. In a recent interview Gabe Newell mentioned that new games by Valve will implement social elements even in single-player titles that they will make. And seeing the popularity of Steam, understanding the ease of use of such things I fully agree with this approach. Yet I wonder – should these online and social elements be forced into any game and can they change the way the game itself works?
One of the main pillars of horror always lay in the feeling of being helpless. Survival horror titles invented many ways to make you feel helpless over the years. Limited ammo, limited healing, limited ability to defend yourself or no ability to heal. Pitch black darkness. Clunky controls versus agile enemies. Immortal or incorporeal monsters… And all of those can be a good thing, but what if there is a limit to how fun the game stays as you become more helpless?
I recently watched a bunch of 90s fatalities in fighting games, read Treyarch saying that they had to cut some of the violence from Black Ops and read about what Valve had to reference when developing L4D2. Which inspired me to write about the violence in games. And no, I don’t me the kind of post about “moms against games” or “Hitler conducted genocide because he loved violent videogames”. What I’m curious about is – do we actually need “realistic” violence in games?
Curiously, it hasn’t been until now that I decided to talk about the topic that inspired me to start doing the GToGD posts. You might’ve heard how “experienced players” like to talk about how “games used to be more challenging and it’s all too easy now”. But, how much of that old challenge was actual challenge and how much of it was just intentional and unintentional bad design? Here’s what I think about it.
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Couple of days ago one of the developers of the cult classic PS2 FPS Black, who’s currently working on Bodycount, had this to say: “It’s a shooter — it’s fundamentally about shooting a gun. What’s the thing I’m going to do a million times, second after second, in the game? I’m going to pull a trigger, yeah? That better be bloody amazing.” And he’s right. Too many shooters nowadays seem to focus on time powers, some acrobatics or other features while having really boring shooting part. Black didn’t have an amazing story, it wasn’t particularly innovative. But shooting felt good. So it got me thinking – does this affect other genres? When the strongest point or part of a game is actually weak?
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