tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34033863589861542422024-03-08T01:24:33.594-08:00post-hypeChris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-44194846316487109672010-06-04T14:52:00.000-07:002010-06-05T02:59:52.143-07:00Secondary Concerns<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TAc478TmD-I/AAAAAAAAAGc/K-IfuRvJdj8/s1600/beard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TAc478TmD-I/AAAAAAAAAGc/K-IfuRvJdj8/s320/beard.jpg" width="254" /></a></div>I can't think of another game so destroyed by its dialogue as <i>Splinter Cell: Conviction</i>; not by bad lines alone (which are nothing novel in gaming) but by the way Ubisoft's designers and programmers used them. It could live on, maybe, as a cautionary tale in design meetings: "your idea would poison our game, sure as secondary dialogue killed <i>Conviction</i>!" It struck me because secondary dialogue is a subject I know a little about.<br />
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Secondary dialogue, or situational dialogue, means lines shouted by the doomed, samefaced individuals who jump boldly in front of the player's gun; lines like "You just fucked with the wrong Russian!" or "You shot me right in my Russian knees!" or "I die, so far from my homeland, Russia!" (I'm not making fun of the nice Russian dude who commented on my last post; a lot of shooter villains are Russian.) The lines will stay more like 5-7 words long, because the gamer is in the shooting-people business, not the listening-to-monologues business. (The casting business?) Sandbox games offer more flexibility for the writer, but feature more NPC personas and many more lines to write. Basically, this is the low-rent dialogue, the writing done in bulk by interns, assistant writers, and whoever else steps in when the overworked lead writer doesn't have time to stare at an Excel spreadsheet that demands 5 different lines for 40 different actions for 50 different personas. And I was one of those interns*!<br />
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<b>Two-Fisted Tales of Internship</b><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>This marginal dialogue is rarely done well. Before outlining my reasons for thinking so, a disclaimer: because the stories in this post come from my own experience, they offer an undoubtedly distorted view of games like <i>The Punisher</i>, which I worked on for a few months, but others worked on for years. I'm not trying to color anyone's impressions of these games by discussing their development, I'm only using them to talk about dialogue in general terms. My impression is that all people are terrible at judging the quality of their own work, or the quality of projects they've been involved in, so I'll try to avoid that.<br />
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Secondary dialogue signals AI state changes, like the transition from suspicion ("That noise...like the fascist footsteps of Frank Castle!") to aggression ("Enjoy my aimless spray of bullets, Castle!"). Strangely, these lines are thought to add atmosphere. I have no theory about the origins of this common belief; secondary dialogue is more likely to kill immersion than enhance it.<br />
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It makes no sense for your opponents to crow about how unafraid they are, when the player character is the most terrifying murder machine these poor bastards will ever encounter. Often the NPCs seem weirdly familiar with the protagonist -- many sentences look better on paper if they address someone else, so you tag a name on the end of them, like "Fisher" or "Castle." (Whether these lines sound right when spoken out loud is <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/16/">up for debate</a>.) It's hard to imagine the personality that would keep up a stream of wisecracks and threats while being hunted down by a remorseless, silent being, but, somehow, that personality is everywhere. In games, it's the very definition of a criminal mind.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TAl486OhAkI/AAAAAAAAAGk/C1U272G0Zdo/s1600/punisherdoor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TAl486OhAkI/AAAAAAAAAGk/C1U272G0Zdo/s320/punisherdoor.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Most people wouldn't taunt this individual.</i></div><br />
Resource limitations, not writers, create the framework for these lines, and that's most of the problem. You've probably heard that action creates character. And, obviously, context shapes dialogue. You can't tell a joke without context; you need a setup and a payoff. Even a non sequitur requires context, an established topic to be irrelevant to. But situational lines are defined too loosely to give you any of that. You don't know the specifics of what the player might be doing, or what exactly the persona is reacting to. (It's not doable to stream a ton of very specific conditions and separate line pools off the disc.) The persona's behavior is generic, so their character must also be generic. That's why these lines usually suck.<br />
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Picture this: you come up with one of the 5 lines that Russian #3 might say when the player gives him a non-fatal wound. He shouts defiantly: "It'll grow back!" That's not ha-ha funny, but it might work in-game. Of course, it depends on how the voice actor delivers it, which will happen months from now at a voice acting session you won't attend (unless we assume you are the lead writer). You just wrote five variations on "I'm reloading like a champ!", so this reptile joke seems like a step up. (There are far fewer ways to say "cover me while I reload" than there are to say "I love you." Besides, most of the alternate ways people list to say "I love you" either involve more than 7 words or some specific action, and we don't have the resources for that.)<br />
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But does the line really make sense? Limbs don't fly off in this game, so there's no visual to counterpoint Russian 3's bravado. If the player just shot Russian 3 in the dick, this line could be a home run, but you're not working with that level of specificity. The only lines you can imagine that would make sense in <i>every</i> situation where the dialogue could be triggered bore you to tears. <br />
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There's so much material, you're bound to find some redundancy. Steve Jaros, writer of the <i>Saints Row</i> games, once found that while working separately we had each written, virtually word-for-word, the same combat line for different Rich Guy personas: "It's come down to fisticuffs, has it?" I don't know how many lines were written for <i>Saints Row</i>, but there were at least, as Marcus Fenix would say, "ten shitloads." Steve showed me the master audio spreadsheet once, and it had so many columns in it that Excel had stopped letting them create more columns. Like <i>Bubble Bobble</i>, Excel does have an ending, but almost nobody sees it. <br />
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A lack of specificity in trigger descriptions can also muck things up: maybe when a programmer and writer hashed out the conditions for lines to play, they recorded these conditions imprecisely, there was some misunderstanding, or the AI behavior was changed later on in the project. In <i>Saints Row</i>, there's one line that plays for a cop persona if you shoot his partner: "He was just two days from retirement!" (Or something very like that.) At least, I think the written description said it would play when you shoot his partner. In the finished game it plays if you shoot anyone within a generous radius of the cop. If you shoot an investment banker crossing the street, the cop will yell at you about his retirement. This might be hilarious -- what the hell, why did the cop know so much about that random dude? It doesn't work as intended, though.<br />
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Possible ESRB reactions are a delightful source of speculation for creators of games like <i>The Punisher </i>and<i> Saints Row. </i>The ESRB's rating committees supposedly come from a pool of individuals in different professions (no word on whether they do a better job of this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_film_is_not_yet_rated">than the MPAA</a>), so maybe you'll draw a fireman, lawyer, schoolteacher, whatever. But it was pretty clear that unless <i>The Punisher</i> rolled a committee of 3 state executioners, it was skirting an AO rating -- and of course, Wal-Mart won't sell an AO title. So I got a couple of instructions to retailor dialogue to suit anticipated demands from the ESRB. These were not explicit orders from the organization (unlike applying a black-and-white filter and changing the camera during environmental kills, which <i>was</i> necessary to avoid AO), but they stemmed from accumulated industry wisdom about dealing with the ESRB, so I believe there's truth to them. I also think similar concerns inform writing at other companies.<br />
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The first instruction was superficial -- I was told to reduce the number of times I used "fuck" in the dialogue. Apparently, my writing had led to line pools containing an unacceptable probability that when the player entered a room, everyone in it might scream the word "fuck" at the same time. One guy might shout "Holy fucking shit, it's the Punisher!", another "Oh God, he'll fuck our eyes right out of our skulls!" and a third, "We're double fucked this time, chaps!" I happen to think this is a pretty realistic reaction if confronted by the Punisher, but I was told that it's really a problem to have so many fucks flying around at the same time. The unthinkable concentration of profanity in this possible fuck-event could send the dainty fingers of the ESRB panel straight to the big red AO buzzer. In retrospect I'm sure that trimming the fuck-count was the right call -- better than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingpin:_Life_of_Crime">Kingpin</a> levels of cursing at least -- but the reasoning behind it stayed with me.<br />
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The second directive is vastly more important, and I often remember it when I play games like <i>Conviction</i>. This will go a bit broader than secondary dialogue, but that's where it starts. Concern arose after I had written some of the many, many "interrogation" lines in <i>The Punisher</i> that play as your torture people. I would sometimes write personas who really couldn't handle the outlandish shit they were being subjected to -- I'm a human being too, look into your heart, who will feed my cat when I'm gone, etc. etc. It was something that came up in the comics all the time. Bad guys beg for their lives, Castle don't care. These interrogation lines were meant to be darkly humorous, as the player would kill everyone no matter what they said.<br />
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I was told to rewrite the lines where anyone expressed a strong desire not to die. It was "sadistic" to kill people who directly asked you not to kill them. This sort of sadism is exactly the stuff that gets us a red flag from the ESRB. I felt pretty bad about this -- I had written sadistic material! -- before I thought about it. The thinking was, it wasn't sadistic to create elaborate torture sequences as a heavily marketed feature; it <i>was</i> sadistic for the people being tortured to death to raise objections. It was sadistic to suggest that the individuals you killed had resembled human beings, that they were afraid to die.<br />
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I thought I was just following through with the concept, but I learned that in games (unlike film or literature), a torture scene must be handled with care. My poorly-conceived dialogue had inadvertently crossed a line developers don't like to go near in their presentation of death. It's all fun and games even after somebody loses an eye; but if a character gets <i>really upset</i> about losing that eye, that might put players on edge. There are plenty of games that claim to be disturbing, but I've seen few willing to take gamers outside their comfort zone.<br />
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Don't believe me? So, how many kids did you kill during the "No Russian" mission in <i>MW2</i>? From what <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NMnnMRWJ-0">I can see</a>, there were no kids in that entire airport...which is a little unlikely, from what I know of airports. Of course, it would be in terribly bad taste if <i>MW2</i> let you to kill children; that would be awfully disturbing. And Infinity Ward didn't <i>really</i> want to give you pause, not like that, oh no. If they actually wanted to guilt-trip you, they would have broken the long-standing kid-killing taboo in modern games (only kinda sorta broken bloodlessly in <i>Bioshock</i>).<br />
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Including kids in cinematic massacres is a cheap trick dating back to that baby carriage on the Odessa steps in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin">1925</a>. But games don't, or can't, take that risk. People begging for their lives, or kids being killed, likely means a straight-up AO from the ESRB no matter what the context. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo might not even allow you to publish a game for their systems if it contains that sort of material (console manufacturers have testing departments that approve or reject every game submitted by developers for said console, and they provide a list of things to fix, organized by priority, after a game is "bounced" from this process). The "No Russian" mission is bullshit for a lot of reasons, but most amazing to me was the uproar over such a sanitized presentation.<br />
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After my original less-than-immortal prose was revised out, <i>The Punisher</i> replaced the sadistic suggestion in its dialogue with a masochistic element. You enter a world where people were almost eager to be killed, just waiting to be fed into wood chippers and have their hearts cut out with a jagged Aztec knife. (They do tend to hang out conveniently around these kill-zones, and they don't put up much resistance once you start feeding them in.) The bad guys sometimes dare you to do it.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><i>Sample scenes from</i> The Punisher**: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TASuPM6EaAI/AAAAAAAAAF8/9Khz4nhsnKo/s1600/punisher_xbox_04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TASuPM6EaAI/AAAAAAAAAF8/9Khz4nhsnKo/s320/punisher_xbox_04.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i></i><i></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Fuck you, fish! I ate a million of you, and you'll only get one of me! Drop me in, Castle, send me straight to the big Red Lobster downstairs!"</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>[laughs good-naturedly as pirahnas consume his face] </i> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TASwzq7cS8I/AAAAAAAAAGE/MFUn8QMO4bs/s1600/Punisher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TASwzq7cS8I/AAAAAAAAAGE/MFUn8QMO4bs/s320/Punisher.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"You think I don't love bashing my forehead against glass, Castle? I eat glass for breakfast! I chew it with my eyelids!"</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TASxkI2GYrI/AAAAAAAAAGM/gWhY8sNea3w/s1600/punisher-20060119045908351.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/TASxkI2GYrI/AAAAAAAAAGM/gWhY8sNea3w/s320/punisher-20060119045908351.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"You think I'm gonna miss those legs, Castle? I hated them! I was about to get rid of 'em myself, and now you saved me the trouble!"</i><i> </i></div><br />
I'm not suggesting that this was anything but the right decision for the game Volition wanted to make. They weren't aiming to disturb players who fed characters into wood chippers; they wanted them to have a good time (the players, that is). It was not in the interest of Volition or THQ to tempt the wrath of the ESRB by making a game where the bad guy dialogue urged the player to reconsider their actions. <i>The Punisher</i> is about killing people in funny ways, and the humor gets a little too black if the people being killed are less cooperative.<br />
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I don't mean any of this as criticism of Volition, which as a studio takes writing and voice acting seriously. They do most writing in-house (unlike some AAA developers who use disastrous scripts by outside writers to fill the gaps between missions). Their writers attend design meetings (believe it or not, some game companies that tout integrated writing and design do not do this). They record a huge amount of voiceover, then scrutinize it. But my short time there showed me that game narratives are unexpectedly limited by what ratings boards will accept.<br />
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At about 8:15 in <a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-egtv-show-the-videogames-election-episode-2">this recent Eurogamer TV episode</a>, a BBFC policy advisor mentions "dwelling on the infliction of pain and injury" as a ratings concern, then a few seconds later repeats "sadistic dwelling on pain and injury" as if that was exactly the same. As if showing the consequences of violence was more objectionable than simple gore and killing. If you're really worried about these things, isn't it worse that games present incredible scenes of slaughter<i> without </i>ever reminding you of the humanity of the people dying?<br />
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I have no moral objections to pretty much anything done in media, which is an imagined space. I don't care about subject matter in games, whether in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhunt_%28series%29"><i>Manhunt</i></a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunt_%28video_game%29"><i>Cunt</i></a> or <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Days_in_Fallujah">Six Days in Fallujah</a></i>, if the game works. (But controversial games usually trumpet their own edginess, and are almost never good.) The objection I raise here isn't really about <i>The Punisher</i> (which I loved working on) but about the ways action games sacrifice the credibility of their worlds to keep the player comfortable.<br />
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<b>Splinter Cell: Conviction</b><br />
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Enemies in <i>Conviction</i> are not interested in self-preservation. This is more of an issue, in my view, than many reviews considered. Yeah, a comment about bad dialogue was usually stuffed in somewhere. (Though Yahtzee did ream the game for this <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1684-Splinter-Cell-Conviction">in his review</a>, and Simon Parkin <a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/splinter-cell-conviction-360-review?page=2">spends a paragraph on it</a>.) But the bullet-point framework of criticism used by the general Metacritic review pool doesn't take into account the way different elements of a work interact with each other. In <i>Conviction</i>'s case, enemy dialogue interacts with the rest of the game by fucking ruining it.<br />
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Whoever decided how often lines should play in this game (either programmers, writers, audio guys, or everyone together) wanted no dead air. They filled every period of silence with noise, as if they worked in radio. They weren't thinking about how to tell a story or build atmosphere. They were thinking "how can we ensure that sound plays at the times when there might not otherwise be sound?" And maybe also thinking "how can we ensure that the player knows exactly what his enemies are doing at every moment?" Their answer was to trigger dialogue constantly, so that the AI broadcasts its every inane thought at all times. It's a great example of how to approach this kind of writing backwards, allowing it to be driven by technology instead of narrative sense. <br />
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They do have a nice little trick of using dialogue unique to the current level; this probably isn't too hard, as long as the same enemy personas don't appear in different levels. Unfortunately, the implementation is blunt, and your enemies' preoccupation with setting is just strange. "You're gonna die here <i>in this museum</i>!" they shout, as if museums were the worst place to die. "This isn't going to be like the airfield!" someone yells, a few levels after the airfield. Why do you think it's different? Because I'm about to kill a noisy jackass at the Washington Monument rather than an airfield? <br />
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<i>Conviction</i> is supposedly a stealth game. It's traditional in stealth games for players to move more slowly and pay more attention to their surroundings than in a run-and-gun shooter; accordingly, those surroundings need to be crafted with great attention to detail. Stealth games need complex levels for players to sneak through and AI with sensible patrolling and searching behavior for players to observe. But even if <i>Conviction</i> had these things, players could hardly fail to notice that the enemy behavior made no sense.<br />
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How could bad dialogue be a minor issue, when it undermines every situation in the game? The plot loses credibility when your enemies act like morons. The combat/stealthing scenarios you find yourself in stop making sense when your opponents are eager to tell you where they are. They're all but asking you to kill them, like the guys in <i>The Punisher</i>. (It doesn't help that <i>Conviction</i> is easy -- I can't remember what the Game Over screen looks like.) <br />
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I suspect that this dialogue is the result of a terrible decision rather than a terrible oversight. During development, secondary dialogue is often temp-recorded (either by high-larious office volunteers or local actors) and stuck into the game so that the team can hear it and comment on what an awful job the writer is doing. There's no chance that <i>Conviction</i> made it all the way through its 10 years of development (or whatever) without somebody pointing out "hey, all of our enemies are saying stupid shit and they're saying it <i>all the time</i>." The problem, I would guess, is that the designers had concluded it was better to provide the player with a few extra scraps of information than build environments that made sense. So they threw out credibility and narrative coherence to make an easy game a little easier.<br />
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<b>A few games that did it right</b><br />
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I don't think all secondary dialogue is bad. It's necessary in sandbox games, and can be helpful in action games if designers take time to do it right. The games that do dialogue best, predictably, tend to be those that pay the most attention to every aspect of their presentation. Here's a short list of games that did interesting things:<br />
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<b>1.</b> <i>GTA:SA</i>, <i>GTAIV</i>, and especially <i>RDR</i>. Rockstar's skill at dreaming up clever pedestrian lines is unmatched, but in my opinion they really hit their stride with <i>SA</i>. If you look at the credits for <i>RDR</i>, you'll see that like 20 people are credited with "Additional Dialogue"; having a bunch of people work part-time on dialogue works better than a few full-timers, who will run out of ideas. <i> </i><br />
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<i>RDR</i> appears to have separate line pools for individual characters, whose names are visible during duels and card games (like the racist conspiracy theorist who kept warning about "the Jews" as I played poker in Armadillo). The downside to this cool idea is that the line pools remain fairly small, so you get the same lines over and over: hearing "that old-timer done <i>shit</i> himself agin" over and over as I played Liars' Dice drove me nuts***.<br />
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<b>2.</b> <i>Bioshock</i>. The Splicer dialogue is creepy as hell, and benefits from being hard to understand.<br />
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<b>3.</b> The <i>Uncharted </i>series. Naughty Dog seems to script tons of lines for the protagonist(s) to shift focus away from what enemies are saying. The writer then has a very clear situation to work in, and maybe fewer lines to write in total, if they don't have to write as much random enemy chatter. This (along with the talent of their writers and actors) works to great effect in <i>Uncharted 2</i>, where the script is polished and well-timed. As I understand it, most developers don't do as much of this because scripters will scream bloody murder about it, as the scripting for all levels in development changes constantly and fixing every line is a time-consuming chore. <br />
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If you remember other games that did a nice job with secondary dialogue (again, fully-voiced dialogue drawn from a pool of interchangeable lines) mention it in the comments; I'm sure I missed many good examples. <br />
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<i>Update</i>: <i>At the risk of making this post even more sprawling, here's a partial run-down of other games with well-done secondary dialogue that have been suggested in <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/cblfj/why_does_game_dialogue_suck_a_former_writing/">reddit comments</a> and personal emails, but haven't shown up in the comments below:</i><br />
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<b>4</b><i>. Half-Life 2: </i>Commenters unchow, polpi, and my friend Zack Kimble thought of the radio communications between Combine soldiers. unchow writes: "The Combine situational dialogue isn't directed at Gordon, it's radio chatter spoken to other Combine, and that female voice giving orders and information to the Combine in the field. And that's the only thing that makes sense in that context."<br />
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<b>5</b><i>. Psychonauts</i> and <i>Brutal Legend</i>: Commenter watercup suggests these for "terrific" random lines, and also mentions Telltale's recent <i>Tales of Monkey Island</i> and <i>The Devil's Playhouse</i>.<br />
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<b>6</b><i>. Far Cry</i>: On reddit, avatar00 writes that "the mercenaries would have side conversations about their lives that made them feel like they weren't actually replaceable. Also, the secondary dialogue changed from them not giving a second thought about killing the random guy to actively fearing your presence as the game progressed."<br />
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<b>7</b><i>. TF2</i> and <i>L4D</i>: Forbizzle suggests these, as does Brady in the comments below. I hadn't thought much about multiplayer games in writing this post, as I usually imagine secondary dialogue coming from NPCs and enemies. But these games' "contextual dialogue," as Forbizzle puts it, is amazing and deserves mention. In <i>L4D, </i>the writing works so deftly that I never <i>mind</i> the characters talking so much. Valve kept the contextual lines brief and functional ("Reloading!" or "Pills here!") and balanced them out with the witty scripted conversations that reveal the survivors' personalities.<br />
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*I was an assistant writer on <i>The Punisher</i>, <i>Saints Row</i>, and <i>Red Faction: Guerrilla</i>. Don't ask about the punctuation of "Saints Row," I had nothing to do with that. Disclosure: my father was a writer at Volition at the time, which certainly helped get my foot in the door. <br />
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**Not actual dialogue. I'm sure in trying to come up with intentionally bad lines as examples for this post, I've replicated things I once wrote with a straight face. But I'm exaggerating, obviously: not every persona will egg you on, and they will often say things like "Alright, I'll tell you whatever you want!" But they won't say "Oh God, please please don't kill me!"<br />
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***Liars' Dice wasn't really a big thing in Texas saloons in 1911, was it? Kind of expected they'd be playing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faro_%28card_game%29">faro </a>or some other impenetrable game. <br />
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<i>Update: Reddit commenter Forbizzle points out <a href="http://www.idlethumbs.net/">Idle Thumbs</a>' hilarious improvisation on the same airfield lines in </i>Conviction<i>, about 3/4 of the way through their podcast </i>"<a href="http://cdn.shacknews.com/public/podcast/idlethumbs/US/theidlethumbspodcast_100430.mp3">Remember The Airfield</a>."<br />
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<i>Email me at post.hype@gmail.com</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-57847795730130359362010-05-20T17:37:00.000-07:002010-05-23T12:52:08.878-07:00VVVVVV's Lesson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-pLiajy5RI/AAAAAAAAAFU/Oi0Y4RgLiJE/s1600/vvvvvv.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-pLiajy5RI/AAAAAAAAAFU/Oi0Y4RgLiJE/s200/vvvvvv.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>If you want to set friends at each others' throats over a game, there's no better question than "how hard was it?" You're asking "how much did the game frustrate you," or, finally, "how much do you suck at playing games?" The conversation enters a death spiral as one party says old games aren't playable, another says every good game is hard, another says that real men play <i>Wizardry</i>, and someone or everyone is called a "baby."<br />
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But it doesn't have to be like this! If everyone plays Terry Cavanagh's <i>VVVVVV</i>, the world might be mended.<br />
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There's a sequence in <i>VVVVVV</i> that deserves to be famous. Everyone who plays the game will remember it; Kieron Gillen already <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/01/12/wot-i-think-vvvvvv/">wrote about it</a>. It's the titular sequence of rooms called <i>Veni, Vidi, Vici!</i>*, and in it you learn how to play games again.<br />
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In<i> VVVVVV</i>, you use a simple gravity-flipping mechanic (no jumping) to progress through various snappy platforming challenges, packaged as individual rooms. Checkpoints appear in nearly every room and you respawn fast; Quintin Smith probably <a href="http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/02/column_battle_klaxon_yes.php">said it best</a> by saying that <i>VVVVVV</i>'s checkpoints "allow players to exist forever in the scorching heat of insurmountable challenges."<br />
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The main plot, rescuing stranded members of your crew, is tough; the <i>VVV</i> rooms themselves are an optional challenge. They're a crazy dare you can't help but accept, because you'll always remember that you couldn't do it if you don't do it.<br />
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Like every good dare, they start with a taunt. You stand on a platform on the first screen, "Doing Things The Hard Way" (every room in the game is named something), separated from the extra credit bauble by a waist-high barrier. Damn your non-vaulting legs! It's a mark of the designer's wit that he begins this notorious segment with a literal stumbling block. <br />
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The only thing to do, then, is fall up, speeding through 6 screens bristling with spikes, flashing by quickly enough that the lurid solid colors conspire to give you a seizure. The 6th screen (Getting Here Is Half the Fun) lets you rest on a dissolving platform for about half a second before you head all the way back down. Going back is the hard part.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-o9GMUepUI/AAAAAAAAAFM/evQ3eyPXqas/s1600/thehardway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-o9GMUepUI/AAAAAAAAAFM/evQ3eyPXqas/s320/thehardway.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This sequence is the heart of the game, and while it may not be <i>the</i> heart of gaming itself, it is one of several hearts keeping the monster that is gaming alive. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The <i>VVV</i> rooms are pure memory. You come untethered from a checkpoint for probably the longest period anywhere in the game. You only need to press the left and right keys, and the action key, once, in the 6th room, at the peak/nadir of your jump/fall. Completing the sequence seems impossible at first, but as you fall through these screens you learn<i> </i> them literally forward and backwards; you find yourself getting just a bit farther, miraculously, with most attempts. You learn the exact amount of pressure to apply on the Left arrow when exiting <i>Vidi </i>to place yourself in the center of the narrow path between <i>Vici!</i>'s walls of spikes. You teach yourself to move precisely.</div><br />
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In player input, the challenge resembles outracing the Quick Man lasers in <i>Mega Man 2</i>, which also required a precise, memorized series of left and right taps from the player, who evaded death beams by falling as they emerged from the sides of the screen. Players had to commit the sequence of platforms below to memory to scramble off them in time to avoid the beams. This famously difficult setpiece could be avoided if players had acquired the Time Stop ability, but where was the fun in that? <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-pMgh1ph7I/AAAAAAAAAFc/khDfmL-gGnc/s1600/megaman2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-pMgh1ph7I/AAAAAAAAAFc/khDfmL-gGnc/s320/megaman2.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<i>VVVVVVV</i>'s memory challenge is harder than <i>Mega Man</i>'s (I know because I just replayed the Quick Man stage, piece of cake) but it also isolates the hard section by installing a checkpoint right at the base of it; <i>Mega Man 2</i>'s killer sequence arrives in the middle of a level full of other difficulties. Cavanagh removes every complication, every concern beyond the task at hand, leaving only a test of memory and performance.<br />
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Memorization isn't often a glamorous activity, but it's one of gaming's essential pleasures. In any difficult platformer (and I can't name a satisfying easy platformer), you will encounter a group of obstacles that seem impossible to overcome; you will invent a plan, or trick, to handle each of these individual obstacles in turn; you will learn to execute this plan perfectly; you will feel very good when it finally works.<br />
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You might remember part of level 5 of <i>Castlevania</i> where you can push an axe-throwing knight off the screen, which is easier than trying to kill him. Or you remember a part of <i>Ninja Gaiden</i> 6-2 where it is safer to jump over a bird than kill it (because killing it would cause it to respawn near the platform you're trying to reach, but if you leave it alive the NES won't be able to draw two birds at once, and will have to wait until the first exits the screen). There are hundreds of tiny strategies that led to your victories over these levels and their bosses. You might not even remember that you know them.<br />
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The best moments of<i> GameCenter CX</i>, a Japanese show where comedian Shinya Arino attempts to beat infamous classic games, focus on his plans for breaking down the toughest levels. He often resorts to pausing the game and consulting with his "assistant" (who is apparently an expert gamer) as they illustrate their plan of action on a whiteboard. Sometimes the show even presents an map of the level that Arino is breaking down, with arrows demonstrating the correct path, like a sportscaster illustrating a replay via light pen. From an episode on <i>Solomon's Key</i>: <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-ufsGnYvPI/AAAAAAAAAFk/RcPuYgAyFVU/s1600/%5BT-N%5DGameCenterCX_-_06%5B787490CE%5D%5B%28077310%2903-24-21%5D.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S-ufsGnYvPI/AAAAAAAAAFk/RcPuYgAyFVU/s320/%5BT-N%5DGameCenterCX_-_06%5B787490CE%5D%5B%28077310%2903-24-21%5D.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Episode subtitled by <a href="http://www.tvnihon.com/tracker/browse.php?cat=79">TV-Nihon</a>.</i></div><br />
In <i>VVVVVV</i>, the form of the plan is obvious: moderate right while rising through <i>Veni</i>, hard left in <i>Vidi</i> (with taps to adjust at the top to position yourself for the middle of the path of <i>Vici!</i> during screen transition), prepare to head right at the top of <i>Vici!</i>, straight halfway through Easy Mode, then a moderate right, etc. As you make incremental improvements each time, you really do learn it; once you've done the sequence once, it's not so hard to do it again.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S_DeeWH61TI/AAAAAAAAAF0/sE-EBifkDYk/s1600/trinket.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S_DeeWH61TI/AAAAAAAAAF0/sE-EBifkDYk/s320/trinket.JPG" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <i>The victory screen. I had to beat it twice because I forgot to take a goddamn screenshot the first time.</i></div><br />
When you finally beat the thing, you feel a massive wave of -- relief? Delight? Enlightenment? You realize that you can beat anything, if you commit to it; that there's nothing truly hard about gaming. I can't translate the message without losing the power that the game has when it teaches you this in gaming's original tongue. For all the posturing by elitists in the gaming community, there's no skill to games but patience. That's the lesson of <i>VVVVVV</i>. <br />
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And once you've learned that you can complete this challenge, platform gaming at its most elemental, you see that all the games you once gave up on are doable. <i>Alien Soldier</i>, <i>Contra</i>, one of the NES <i>Castlevania</i>s, whatever it is -- if you learned the <i>Veni Vidi Vici</i> pattern, what's stopping you from learning the paths to beat those games? <br />
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Secretly, <i>VVVVVV</i> is not just a didactic game, but also a nice game. You don't notice until you take a good look; then you see, in the victory shot above, that once you get to the right of the stumbling block and collect the token, there's a (relatively) safe little passage for you on the underside of the platform, leading you back to the checkpoint. (A truly cruel game would make you go all the way through the <i>Veni Vidi Vici</i> chambers again, backwards, to save your progress.)<br />
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One of the stages in the middle of the <i>VVV</i> sequence is called <i>Easy Mode Unlocked</i>. It's a joke, like most of the room names. It's a joke about the games that do<i> </i>tell you when you've died too many times and should switch to easy mode; these are often the same games that make reviewers bitch and moan about difficulty spikes, as if games was only allowed to be challenging on the very last level, and probably not even then, because the focus group didn't like that.<br />
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"Easy Mode Unlocked" is the most insulting thing you could ever tell the player -- "since you're not good enough for the<i> </i>game as it was meant to be played, why not try it with training wheels on?" Why not take the easy way out, instead of learning or improving? But Cavanagh's joke here is a reassurance that his game doesn't roll like that. <i>VVVVVV</i> would never insult you by cutting you a break.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">***</div><br />
Beating the <i>Veni Vidi Vici! </i>chambers is far from the hardest task in gaming, but that the sequence distills something essential about effort and reward structures. It's much more effective than something like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_The_Guy">IWBTG</a>, a clumsy, ugly game made with the single goal of being quite hard. <br />
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Without the frustrating difficulty, there would be little fun in this sequence. No matter how much artists and scripters may dress up a platformer, there's no joy in playing unless the game takes practice to overcome. Without a buildup, payoffs don't work. A game will present a diegetic story, aping the Hollywood structure, about a man (in games, almost always a man) defeating or bypassing a series of obstacles; but the experience of a game is also the story of what happened to you as you played, of the obstacles that <i>you</i> overcame. If a game never works to get you stuck or overwhelmed or enraged, if there are <i>no real obstacles</i> <i>to your success</i>, then that second narrative fails, and you might as well be watching a movie.<br />
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Maybe everyone thinks everyone knows about this second, crucial narrative; paying attention to it might be the foundation of New Games Journalism anyway. Why, then, do developers and game writers act like they forgot (or never learned) the reason for making games hard? Why do you see articles like <a href="http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/215033/too-big-and-too-hard/">this one</a>, which claims that "an increasing amount of data" [citation needed] says games should be easier**. Games should tone down the challenges that might frighten customers away; developers need to child-proof all these dangerous edges! Never mind that hard games are already becoming rare. What data is being referred to, how was it collected, and what games are these stats were drawn from? Davison cites "telemetry data," which I know is pretty impressive, because MI6 sent me to retrieve it from a silo in <i>Goldeneye</i>.<br />
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Here's a funny story you <a href="http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9023027">might know already</a>: did you hear why <i>Demon's Souls</i> was released by Atlus in the US? 1UP claims SCEA passed on it, figuring that it would only sell "15,000 copies" in its initial run, due to "unorthodox design and unrelenting difficulty." This turned out to be a huge mistake; it sold <a href="http://www.vgchartz.com/games/game.php?id=31689&region=All">half a million copies</a>, the majority of them in the US. Hard games can sell. I'm guessing the people Davison talked to were relying on the same kinds of market research that told SCEA that <i>Demon's Souls</i> would never be a hit. (I don't actually know who Davison was talking to, or what research they used, because he never cites any evidence.)<br />
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If you want a test case for an easy, short game, coast through the 5-hour <i>Splinter Cell: Conviction</i> some time. The story of that game ended for me the minute I figured out that when I crouched behind a crate and began shooting every enemy in the area, I was playing a shooter that was <i>easier</i> than <i>Gears of War</i>. Sure, I half-heartedly stealthed my way through the rest of the game, but I had already seen the rigging behind the stage; I could never really believe in it again. Even as I sat through the arcane horseshit of the game's cutscenes, I was painfully aware that Sam's enemies were not really black ops motherfuckers, but a gang of half-blind screamers who couldn't shoot straight. I couldn't lose; I was much better at aiming for the head than they were.<br />
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Developers should stop thinking of difficulty as a rough patch to be smoothed out. It's a narrative device. If you want gamers to feel they've triumphed against insurmountable odds, actually pit them against something overwhelming. Require some effort before you heap up rewards. We're all wise to fake scripted scares, "urgent situations" that aren't actually timed, and a whole bag of tricks used by developers to disguise situations that are truly tame. Create difficulty spikes, difficulty hills, whatever, as long as it fits the plot. If you want players to beat your game, make it worth beating. <br />
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*I assume <i>Veni vidi vici</i> is the titular phrase, and not <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vvvvv"><i>Vi veri veniversum vivus vici</i></a>, which is short a <i>V</i> anyway.<br />
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**I didn't want to write an entire post about Davison's piece, but here are a few ideas:<br />
1. Maybe consumer buying habits aren't motivated by the amount of time they will <i>actually</i> play a game, but rather the amount of time they <i>imagine</i> they could play it? If that was true, then developers would still have an incentive to make longer games. I often buy games that promise many hours of gameplay, but I tend to rent or borrow games that are 5 hours or shorter.<br />
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2. Most people play only the first four or five hours of a game? Maybe someone should tell them to buy fewer games. (Just messing with you, video game industry!)<br />
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3. I heard the "90% of people only play the first few hours of a game" line at least 5 years ago, and I never saw a citation for it then, either. But, assuming it's true, it's not a new issue.<br />
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4. Davison makes an interesting point about making games more modular. However, DLC is almost always poorly conceived, poorly balanced, buggy, and well below the standard set by the original title. So, I would suggest that developers start making their games much <i>harder</i> and simultaneously ramp up the production of game-breaking superweapons and items as launch-day DLC. Companies that follow this strategy will be able to seed feelings of helplessness and inadequacy in players, then convert that weakness into cold hard cash.<br />
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5. Do games that attach significant bonuses to their "game completed" Achievements coax more playtime out of people than games that don't? <i>ME2</i> had a lot of end-related bonuses, but the game was pretty damn easy as well. <br />
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6. Finally, a "won't someone think of the art" plea: if studios begin capping the possible length of their games as a matter of policy, they also limit the variety of stories they can tell. One of<i> Red Dead Redemption</i>'s best storytelling tricks comes from its willingness to tell a story that goes on and on. A film can only be around three hours long before they start getting impractical to show in theaters (owners want to show a film as many times per day as they can). Games can be much, much longer, and their scope can be as great as a serial format TV show. If every game shrinks to 5 hours, they'll probably all imitate blockbusters, and be the worse for it.<br />
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<i>Mega Man 2 image taken from the Somethingawful.com</i> <i>forums</i>. <i>Email me at post.hype@gmail.com</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-21164989713993353962010-04-19T08:23:00.000-07:002010-04-19T08:25:37.312-07:00Assassin's Creed 2 Was Never Good<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S8x158vUejI/AAAAAAAAAFE/gatZRWSLdfI/s1600/notorious.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S8x158vUejI/AAAAAAAAAFE/gatZRWSLdfI/s320/notorious.JPG" /></a></div>Why do so many new games begin badly? <i>Final Fantasy XIII</i> forced me to watch the endless squabbling of a crew of adult babies irritating enough to star in their own anime series; <i>Mass Effect 2</i> made me sit through a lengthy pseudo-cinematic where my Shepard died saving a character I would gladly vent out an airlock. Some developers must have the idea that gamers should be impressed by a mandatory, barely-interactive narrative introduction, then made to slog through interminable tutorials on subjects that were formerly consigned to a thing we used to call "the manual". The director Samuel Fuller said that he began every film gripping his audience "by the balls"; game developers often seem more interested in hand-holding.<br />
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It's as if nobody considered that the creators of older games with one-page plot scrawls and brief instructions might have actually <i>known what they were doing</i> when they brought the player to the fun part of the game as fast as they could. It's weird that "sink or swim" is now considered retro design. Do you remember when you first get a gun in that diner in the original <i>Silent Hill</i>, the radio starts buzzing, and then a winged monstrosity crashes through the window and comes straight at you? And nobody had even told you how to <i>use</i> the gun? (R2 + X, as anyone who's covered wars before can tell you.) Now that was some scary shit. <br />
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I mention this because<i> AC2</i> has an awful beginning.<br />
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<i>AC2 </i><i></i>greets you with the gap-toothed grin shared by all careless ports: an intro screen asking you to "Press Enter." After starting a new game, you watch a recap video about the first game (unskippable). You're reintroduced to Desmond and Lucy, both dull as ever -- if anything, Desmond whines even more than I remember. He could be the wimpiest character ever to speak with Nathan Drake's voice. On the 360, something appeared to have gone very wrong with the surface of Lucy's face in the time between <i>AC1 </i>and <i>AC2</i>, but on the PC she does look like a human being again. Score one for the port!<br />
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Desmond and Lucy escape from Abstergo after a few minutes of running around. They keep stopping and talking. I've heard that console games sometimes insert these "walking and talking" sections in order to hide load times for the next area; that's why your squad in <i>Gears of War </i>will stop, hands glued to ears, and chatter as they inch forward like turtles. (Seeing any member of the Gears squad take off their armor would be as disturbing as watching a tortoise leave its shell.) So I'm always suspicious when games suddenly slow things down and the characters keep talking but take forever to get to the point. I don't know whether these scenes are an artifact of console loading problems or boring script problems, but the effect is the same.<br />
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After an un-loseable fistfight with some guards, you're introduced to two Assassin-nerds who provide support for Desmond's trip. One of them is in charge of working the new Animus, the other is in charge of making catty remarks and hating Desmond for no special reason. Watching a prissy dork insult a toothless clone of Nathan Drake is really not a core part of the <i>Assassin's Creed</i> experience, yet the game not only makes you sit through a cinematic of this, it then forces you to walk over and talk to him again before you can progress. Again, this is the start of the game, the most significant part there is. Desmond mutters about what a dick his new co-worker is, but why doesn't he, you know, punch him in the face or something? (These Assassins are screwed without Desmond's help, so what are they gonna do?) After spending an entire previous game getting to know him, Desmond remains a total blank whose life is all reaction; God forbid he show initiative or pride or malice of his own.<br />
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I would appreciate it if writers observed an informal rule about not putting two very annoying characters in the same place at the same time. And if you have to do that, try to avoid creating tedious verbal slap-fights between them. If you don't keep an eye on these things, you might wind up making <i>Final Fantasy XIII</i> by accident.<br />
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After this protracted getting-to-know-you session with characters who barely show up for most of the game, you pop into the Animus 2.0. Then the tutorial begins.<br />
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The first section of the tutorial is another easy-street fistfight, the player now stepping into ancestor Ezio's shoes. But the game actually just made you play through a different fistfight, as Desmond, where you flailed around without any on-screen instructions. What was that, a warm-up before the real fistfight tutorial? As in the original <i>Assassin's Creed</i>, the brawling is lousy, and you're left waiting for some time before learning the counter technique that brings sense to the X-button-mashing combat.<br />
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<i>AC2</i> claims that Desmond needs to relive Ezio's training so that a bleeding effect from the Animus will grant Desmond Renaissance-era fighting skills in real life. (This does come in handy at the end of the game, when the Templars attacking Desmond obligingly neglect to bring any guns.) But didn't he already learn this shit by living Altair's life? Apparently Desmond is such a moron that in a few days he forgot all the things that <i>I</i> still remember how to do from playing as Altair a couple years ago.<br />
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Desmond absorbing assassin skills and then escaping from Abstergo would have been a fitting conclusion to the first game, which was structured to contrast Desmond's helplessness in the present with his ancestor's prime badassery in the past. However, someone at Ubisoft must have realized that providing any kind of satisfying ending would make it hard to drag the <i>AC</i> series out for a decade, and they ended the game with Desmond staring at his wall instead.<br />
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This fear of narrative progress defines <i>AC2</i>:<i> </i>Ubisoft wanted to drag a story out rather than tell a good one. It's a short game stretched out. Even the tutorial assignments make you spend far too long performing simple techniques (how to walk in a crowd, for example) that you've long since mastered. <i>AC2</i> often repeats the same familiar tasks over multiple missions: you're first told to free one guy from a cage, then given a second mission to free three groups of guys from three cages located around the city. And this itself follows a group of cage-freeing missions a few memories earlier.<br />
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These tasks could have been fun if they were challenging, but the game's simple counter system and armor upgrades turn everything into a cakewalk. Once you're clanking around in metal armor, you become Renaissance Terminator; you can barge in through the front door of a hostile area, killing everything between you and the target. Surprisingly, there are virtually no challenges to be found in the game's sandbox. Unlike <i>GTA</i>-style law enforcement, Italy's guards don't put together any form of escalating response. If you beat one group of guards, backup is not on its way. <i>AC2</i>'s cities are never varied or threatening enough to play around in for long.<br />
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Restrictive, ham-fisted scripting cripples any sense of "open world" immersion. You're given tedious surveillance assignments where Ezio follows his major enemies around at a distance in order to eavesdrop on them. Why not just drop down from the rooftops and insta-kill them (as you've done to so many others) after hearing their evil plan to poison the Doge, or whatever? Murdering the poisoner is a common-sense method to prevent a poisoning, but the designers won't allow it; after all, they need to string this assassination out over several more missions. <br />
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The designers betray their lack of faith in the world they made. They cordon it off and push you to act only one way, applying nonsensical conditions to a supposedly open environment. Hilariously, the Assassin mantra repeated so often in cutscenes is "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." The centuries of secret war between Templars and Assassins (a plot resembling but never approaching the greatness of <i>The Invisibles</i>) pits nasty control against heroic freedom. Did the designers not realize what enormous hypocrites they were, by restricting the player's options so radically? <br />
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In Memory 13 you get multiple assassination missions that insist you finish the job without being seen. You instantly fail if a guard becomes suspicious. These aren't optional missions or special challenges, they're required sections of the story mode. Naturally, there should be a <i>narrative</i> reason to impose this extra rule, but none exists. There's certainly no reason for Ezio to remain anonymous, as everyone in Italy seems to know about the famous assassin stabbing people left and right; the mission conditions don't care if you're seen standing over the victim's dead body, either. You <i>know</i> that Ezio can storm in, shrugging off guards, and jump on the target's throat. You know this works because you've done it before. Yet now some whim of the gods -- not an element in the world itself -- prevents you from doing this. It's lazy, disjointed design.<br />
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The hardest mandatory stealth mission asks you to attack an crazed merchant holed up on a boat that's swarming with bodyguards. At first this seemed like a tough nut to crack, as the guards inevitably saw me climbing the rigging or trying to pick them off one by one. Eventually, I realized I could just stand outside the boat shooting guards with my gun (a device the moronic AI apparently doesn't understand) until the curious target walked over to the railing, and then I shot him too. Yes, Renaissance Terminator does have a gun: that's part of what makes him Renaissance Terminator. <br />
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Sometimes when you get your hands on VIP targets, the game arbitrarily prevents you from killing them. The original <i>AC </i>was a mess, but there was one rule it rarely broke: every enemy was vulnerable. The assassination missions were about using every means available to break through a tough shell of troops and fortifications to touch the soft target in their center. No matter how important that person was, they fell to a blade in the neck as easily as everyone else. The challenge of reaching them (harder than anything in <i>AC2</i>) was all; once you got in range, you only had to execute. The game was really about <i>assassination</i>, as the title would suggest. <br />
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<i>AC2</i> is a game about convoluted scripted bullshit. Several targets play by their own, supernatural rules. When the game wants Francesco de Pazzi alive for a future sequence, it won't let you target him as he runs away; when it makes you fight Dante or Rodrigo Borgia, it won't let you backstab them or perform killing counters with the hidden blade. The hidden blade (my usual weapon) is useless in those fights, though the game did nothing to warn me or explain why. It's jarringly inconsistent for the <i>AC</i> series, where even heavily armored, large enemies can die instantly to your finesse counters. The best idea the <i>Assassin's Creed</i> series ever had was villains that were weak when isolated, their frailty making them something more human than a video game "boss." <i>AC2</i> either doesn't understand or doesn't care for that concept. <br />
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The worst moment comes in Memory 11, where Rodrigo knocks Ezio down in a cinematic and starts running away. One of your friends (who has been standing around, doing nothing) immediately says something like "Well, he got away." Are you shitting me? A grossly fat man who is constantly illuminated by a mysterious red light is going to outrun Ezio Auditore, just because he has a few seconds' head start? Hasn't the game already made me chase people down a dozen times in situations like this? <br />
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I'd have been more enthusiastic about working my way through the game if I liked the story. <i>AC1</i> is an idiosyncratic story told in awkward, bizarre ways; <i>AC2 </i>is a boring story that plays out smoothly. The (really uneven) biopic parody <i>Walk Hard </i>has a running gag where the hero keeps stumbling into nearly every famous musician of his day, and they all shamelessly remind the audience what musical celebrity they're supposed to be, in case anyone forgets. <i>AC2</i>'s plot works like that, scrambling to get cameos from virtually every 16th century Italian you learned about in high school. It mostly plays things straight, even while asking you to accept Leonardo da Vinci as a Renaissance Q to Ezio's Bond, or interesting figures like the Borgias as hateful cartoons. Characters like Machiavelli are neither explored in-depth nor used as hilarious parts of a whopping yarn. They appear just for name recognition. I don't know why Machiavelli is in <i>AC2</i> at all, as his character is never really defined, and he even gets rather easily outsmarted in Memory 12. <br />
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The overarching conspiracy you read about after solving the game's optional puzzles is even harder to take seriously; it's one of those stories that only seems to involve the most famous people who ever lived. I liked Shaun's theory about how Altair's Codex traveled from the Middle East to Italy: "Marco Polo, by way of Dante Alighieri!" After loading all the baggage he had to carry for 2009's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncharted_2">inane plots</a>, it's a miracle Polo had room on board for his fucking journal.<br />
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(Also, really? Dante didn't even bother learning Greek to read Homer, despite writing about him all the time; why would he want a coded book based in foreign languages? Was he going to decode it while hanging out with his good friends Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Gower, William of Ockham, Ibn Battuta, Langland, and the <i>Pearl</i> poet? <i>Assassin's Creed</i> <i>3</i>, amirite?)<br />
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I should mention that, to pad out its playing time even further, the game makes you complete an extensive treasure hunt, which had earlier been presented as optional, before you can play the final mission. For the last 5-10 hours of the game, I fought a mounting compulsion to quit playing and never finish<i> </i>it. I realized I had a hundred better games on hand I should play -- <i>Policenauts</i>, <i>DAO:A</i>, <i>Persona 2</i>, <i>Metro 2033</i>, etc. -- in place of the naked waste of my time that was <i>AC2</i>. And then it sent me retracing my steps to find some goddamn Codex pages that any of my many Assassin friends could have collected using the map I had acquired. What a perfectly bullshit note to end on, <i>AC2</i>. <br />
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<i>I guess nobody can say "Ubisoft" in good conscience without also saying "DRM," so here's my DRM mention. I have no idea why Ubisoft think people will pay $50 for a year-old game that performed below expectations and now has corrosive DRM acid for blood. The game's appeal was thin even before it became a monument to corporate spite.</i><br />
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</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-37204192229284351382010-04-05T19:28:00.000-07:002010-04-06T18:19:12.926-07:00Sound Strategy in Starcraft II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S7cdVrpeWHI/AAAAAAAAAEM/lanI-cF6jLg/s1600/scui.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S7cdVrpeWHI/AAAAAAAAAEM/lanI-cF6jLg/s320/scui.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The UI in <i>Starcraft II</i> is a beautiful display. Like everything else (except <a href="http://post-hype.blogspot.com/2010/03/starcraft-iis-biggest-flaw.html">the ladder</a>), it's so refined that its excellence barely registers. It's not subtle: big blocky forms house unit data, an animated portrait, and the minimap on the lower quarter of the screen, while a bar at the top shows a standard RTS info ticker (resources, supply cap, etc.) It retains the look of the original <i>Starcraft</i> UI, but decorates it with race-specific touches. If the image to the left was an animated .gif, you could see the Zerg tentacles gripping the HUD undulate.<br />
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Unlike some other cumbersome Blizzard UIs (<i>Diablo </i><a href="http://www.everyjoe.com/thegadgetblog/files/2009/11/diablo1.jpg">comes to mind</a>), the <i>SC</i> interface has a legitimate claim to all that screen real estate. More than anything, <i>Starcraft</i> is a game about managing a huge volume of information: directing units on the battlefield while continuing to spend resources, noticing when buildings and research back in your base are completed, scouting for enemy expansions on the minimap, and keeping tabs on innumerable micro and macro concerns. But the UI couldn't be large enough (and if it were, your eyes couldn't watch enough of it) to tell you everything you want to know. The <i>SC</i> UI doesn't try to make you <i>watch</i> all this information; often, it lets you hear it.<br />
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I don't want to talk about the short, funny lines units say when selected, or the separate musical themes for each race. These add a lot of flavor to the game, but they've already been pored over elsewhere. I'm more interested in function than ornamentation: <i>SCII</i>'s audio is fascinating because it can play a huge role in the actual strategy and flow of the game.<br />
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There are a few odd sounds that become familiar to every player. The Zerg Changeling impersonates one of your units, assuming a friendly form (say, a Zealot) and not appearing hostile until clicked; however, the sound of an Overseer dropping a Changeling in sight of your buildings is distinctive, and as soon as you hear it you begin hunting for strange Zealots. If the UI displayed a visual alert that your enemy had made a Changeling, the unit would be nearly useless. Blizzard gives players an audio cue instead, playing an unusual noise that can either pass without notice or be a dead giveaway.<br />
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A few sounds will never pass without notice: the Nydus worm (a Zerg unit that can ferry an army from his base straight into yours) roars as it breaks through the earth, leaving any unprepared player scrambling to get a visual of it. A friend of mine called the telltale sound of Terran tanks going into Siege mode a "fight-or-flight" signal, and the game has a number of little cues like it. A visual reminder that "enemy tanks have entered siege mode!" would be overkill, but knowing that they <i>have</i> just sieged is essential data. More than any other RTS I've played, <i>SCII</i> tries to create a second channel of communication to the player through a varied set of audio signals.<br />
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It's expected that an RTS game will provide audio cues for building completion and combat, but even these seem to have heightened importance in <i>SCII</i>. I'm always listening for that strange whispery rushing sound played whenever a Protoss building finishes warping in. In a game where build order is vital, I really think this sound helps me find a rhythm early in the game, and keep track of the tech in my base while I'm moving an army around the map. Although your eyes might be jumping back to the resource ticker, the audio also becomes an essential part of your planning and pacing.<br />
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I know one solid audio trick, but I'm sure better <i>SCII </i>players have many more. On the map Blistering Sands, the player's base can be reached either through the standard frontal chokepoint or a "back door" entrance covered by destructible rocks, which units must attack for some time to break. It's often a good idea to go through the rocks early in the game, bypassing the other player's army and attacking his workers directly. To guard against this, players can leave a cheap building -- a pylon or supply depot -- on the inside of their base to watch the rocks.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S7m3RhGmg2I/AAAAAAAAAEk/1LLcqxHeaCU/s1600/pylonbetter.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S7m3RhGmg2I/AAAAAAAAAEk/1LLcqxHeaCU/s400/pylonbetter.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-style: italic;">From my perspective: a pylon placed between the tall grass serves as an early warning system.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><i> </i> <br />
The image above is from a ladder game where I took this basic step. The pylon does give visibility of the rocks, but an indifferent minimap watcher like myself might miss seeing units even when they did appear. The pylon's real value is letting me <i>hear</i> enemy units attacking the rocks, even when I'm not looking at them. In <i>SCII</i>, you can hear sounds from revealed areas on the map even if those areas are offscreen.<br />
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That feature actually won this game for me. In the image above, two enemy units are attacking the rocks. It's almost impossible to see them in a screenshot, as they were stealthed. But I could hear them just fine; their attacks are as loud as those of any visible unit.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S7m5yWs69QI/AAAAAAAAAEs/NIJ3OHZg3Rw/s1600/dts.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S7m5yWs69QI/AAAAAAAAAEs/NIJ3OHZg3Rw/s400/dts.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The replay's omniscient perspective reveals the enemy Protoss player's stealthed Dark Templars, hidden in the previous screenshot. </i></div><br />
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The other player chose to attack the rocks with invisible units, knowing they wouldn't appear on my minimap. But this was a mistake that probably cost him the game, because hearing their attacks told me:<br />
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1. The other player was trying to attack my base by going through the rocks.<br />
2. The other player was producing Dark Templars, which are extremely vulnerable to an army accompanied by an Observer, which reveals invisible units.<br />
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All of this was communicated simply from the sound of the DTs' attacks and the fact that I couldn't see them. From there the game was easily won, as my army and an Observer chased down the DTs, then stormed the enemy base. It still amazes me that this game (admittedly, a game between two low-ranked players) hinged on that single eavesdropping pylon. The match remains one of the most memorable experiences I've had in <i>SCII</i>.<br />
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<i>If anyone else in the beta has thoughts about the game's sound design, I'd love to hear it in the comments. The sound effects described above are just a brief list; I'm sure there's a lot of significant audio I failed to notice. Email me about this post at post.hype@gmail.com.</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-80031946235872804902010-03-21T18:50:00.000-07:002010-04-10T19:03:24.449-07:00Starcraft II's Biggest Flaw<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S6S0-ct6d8I/AAAAAAAAAEE/nMeDf_wHd7U/s1600-h/fieldinglater.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S6S0-ct6d8I/AAAAAAAAAEE/nMeDf_wHd7U/s320/fieldinglater.JPG" /></a></div><i>A revised (read: better) version of this article can be read <a href="http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2010/04/title_the_biggest_flaw_in_star.php">here</a>. </i><br />
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I've been in the <i>Starcraft II</i> beta for a couple of weeks now. For the most part, it's the gleaming, precision-engineered RTS you expect. But there's an issue with the coverage the game has received so far; most previewers seem to have missed that a big piece of the game's multiplayer is seriously <i>not working</i>, and it's unlikely Blizzard will fix it before release.<br />
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Before I go into that major flaw, I'll guess why this hasn't been written up in a major gaming outlet (so far as I've read). Many articles I've read wind up sounding a bit like Tom Chick <a href="http://fidgit.com/archives/2010/02/exclusive_report_from_the_fron.php">here</a>: "pretty enough, but it seems impossible to win against those hardcore kids online, etc." Other writers don't seem to <a href="http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2010/03/09/starcraft-2-beta-first-impressions/1">understand the RTS genre at all</a> ("a crucial area where <i>SC </i>differs from other strategy games is that you need to assign [workers] to build things"? "The focus of the game is pretty much solely economic strategy"?). Most "first impressions" pieces read like their authors didn't spend more than an hour or two playing online. I assume that's why none of them mention that the game's ladder system is completely hosed. <br />
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The strength of its ladder system will be essential to <i>Starcraft II</i>'s staying power. The ladder resides on battle.net, but it works as an integral part of <i>SCII</i>. It's the hook that keeps you playing all night, grinding those short matches (1v1s are often below 15 minutes), accumulating points, and clawing your way to the top of the rankings. This game gives you <i>rested experience</i> to help you gain ranks after some time away. You can't appreciate the seductiveness of this system until you've spent some time trying to get to the top of your league, and no game critic I've read seems to have done that. (Nobody posts a picture of their ranking, and only Quinns <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/01/three-world-war-part-1/">details</a> his ongoing project of attaining "competence.") But once you've done a bit of climbing, the ladder starts looking wobbly indeed. <br />
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(This is not in any way a view from the top. I am a terrible <i>SCII </i>player. I never played multiplayer in the original, spending my online RTS time in <i>AOEII</i> and, later, <i>WC3 </i>instead. Like the <i>Counter-Strike</i> world, the <i>SC </i>community was sufficiently entrenched to deter me from trying to join in after missing the initial year or so. But for the people who say they "can't win online" in <i>SCII</i>, believe me, you can win. If you're placed in Copper, you can beat those people. They're all game reviewers and Activision employees.) <br />
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<i>SCII</i> has 5 leagues: Copper, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. You're placed in a division within your league -- supposedly the divisions are random -- and ranked according to your performance. You want to ascend to the first rank in your division, from which point you will move on to a higher, more skilled league. In theory.<br />
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In practice, these separations lack meaning. You play everybody else from every division. When you're matched with people, you're told if one side is "Favored" or "Slightly Favored" to win, or if the teams are even. You are very rarely matched with people within your own division. You actually feel like giving your division-mates a high-five when you find yourself in a game with them, like two people from the same town who run into each other in the big city. Blue posters on the b.net forums have claimed the division system is strong because it makes people feel better about themselves ("I'm 4th in my division!"). But only very stupid people will find satisfaction in this, because you are not even competing with the people in your division. You rarely see them. You compete with <i>everyone</i>, and then are arbitrarily compared to a tiny, random sliver of that population. <br />
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Say you just ran a race, along with 20,000 other people. You finish behind about 7,000 of them. You look at the standings and it says you finished 4th. In a move to boost participants' self-esteem, the race's organizers have divided the standings into 200 randomly selected groups. Do you really feel better? Or do you feel like somebody is fucking with you? <br />
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As you begin seeing players from other leagues, you learn how rotten the system really is. As you climb upward in your division, competitors from higher leagues appear. I've beaten Bronze, Silver, and even a few Gold players, yet I was never promoted from my position as #1 Copper. The system tells me that I am "Favored" against nearly all Bronze players it pairs me with; if I see "Teams Even," I usually know I'm facing either a high rank Bronze or an average Silver. In other words, the game's odds-maker routinely tells me I am on even footing with people who are literally <i>out of my league</i>. They are, in some cases, two leagues above me. And my own state is nowhere near as unfair as some others. Consider <a href="http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=115886">szcz</a>, a #1 Silver who routinely plays and beats the top Platinum players, and is even Favored against some of them. What kind of lunatic devised a ladder that evaluates player performance with a system different from the one it uses to actually rank them?<br />
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You might think a game that prides itself on being at the frontier of "e-sports" would have a rewards system based, you know, on <i>winning or losing</i>. A traditional measure of sporting success! But you would be wrong. A Blizzard employee, Bashiok, posted the following FAQ:<br />
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<span class="blue"><i>Q. How does a player move from one league to another? </i> <br />
A. <i>After you’ve finished your initial placement, the system continues to review your performance and determines what league you should be placed in based on those reviews. The time and frequency of these reviews is kept hidden.</i> </span> <br />
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As is all information about what data will be "reviewed." So movement from league to league is governed by some double-secret method; elsewhere it was claimed that this system must be hidden or people would exploit it. Forum posters hypothesize that the scoring might be based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actions_per_minute">actions per minute</a>, unspent resources, and other trivia that the game records. Hey, you know what's hard to exploit? A system that only rewards you when you win. That's kind of how tournaments work. Even unusual conditions like "beat 4 Silver players in a row, advance to Silver" or "lose to 4 Bronze players in a row, fall to Bronze" would be vastly preferable to the system currently in place, which offers the player no goals for improvement. <br />
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If you still don't see how useless this setup is, let me tell you a story. When I started -- with no experience, a much worse player than I am now -- I did well enough in placement matches to be put into Bronze. I played some games, lost some, but won enough to be in the top 30 Bronze players in my division. Then, one fine day, I came out of a winning game and received a message saying that I was being bumped down a league. I was demoted on the <i>victory screen</i>, and no reason was given. I still don't know why. (Unless, perhaps, my stately 30 apm was to blame.)<br />
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When the game should have congratulated me, it kicked me in the balls. People claim that Blizzard developers are savvy about structuring rewards to addict players, but the <i>SCII </i>team isn't; they made their rankings as arbitrary and obscure as they could. In <i>WoW</i>, the remaining work needed to advance a level level is displayed onscreen <i>all the time</i> as part of the default UI. In <i>SCII</i> the rewards you receive are a deliberate mystery; like miracles, you can only hope they will happen. <br />
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Soon after I was dropped to Copper, I rose to #1 in my division, and I've rarely been matched against other Copper players since reaching that spot. Again, I felt like I'd been punished for no reason.<br />
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Although I do feel like this ladder made a personal enemy of me, it's flimsy for broader reasons as well. You can't see who the best players in your league are, only the best players in your own tiny division (and remember, you play people from within your division only as frequently as you play people from all the other divisions). You can't even gauge skill by looking at a player's league, because the system routinely matches some players with people from higher leagues. These endless tiers and sub-tiers of players tell so much less than a single list for each league would. The crowning perversity is that Blizzard posters believe this ladder actually encourages people.<br />
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I know you're thinking "oh, it's beta, they'll fix it before release." However, blue posters don't even acknowledge that there's a problem. It's not like <a href="http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=115277">these issues</a>, brilliantly analyzed by some of the best players in the community, problems that require tweaking of build times to balance; there's no easy fix for a ladder that needs to be drastically overhauled. A merit-based reward system must be transparent. As it stands, the system is opaque by necessity, and it needs to be altered.<br />
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On the other hand, if Blizzard ever does recognize the problem, a new concept isn't hard to work out. Make a global ladder for each league. Rank everyone. Do not match people from different leagues together. Instead, only look for matches within that person's own league, even if one player is much lower than another in the league. When the top ranked players in the league start dominating mid-ranked players, mark those top players for review. Have them do placement matches again (maybe fewer this time) to see if they can place into other league.<br />
You might think "who cares if the ladder sucks, as long as the game is good." But the ladder is inseparable from the game. You see your rank and league every time you look for a new multiplayer match. When you hit "find game," the ladder determines who to pair you with. For the average player, the ladder will be a huge part of <i>Starcraft II</i>. And right now, it sucks.Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-84439297388139737522010-03-10T11:23:00.000-08:002010-05-20T16:06:14.736-07:00The Best Story in Mass Effect 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S25hSaOOxXI/AAAAAAAAABM/VLoW17tYlkQ/s1600-h/morsmirk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S25hSaOOxXI/AAAAAAAAABM/VLoW17tYlkQ/s200/morsmirk.jpg" width="178" /></a></div><i>Major spoilers for </i>Mass Effect 2<i> and </i>Dragon Age<i> follow. Bonus spoiler: </i>Baldur's Gate<i>.</i><br />
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There's no shortage of fights to pick over <i>Mass Effect 2</i>. Minigames supplant grinding, character quests largely replace a traditional second act, and greater ease of use means fewer stats. Shepard's decisions scale down: she may choose to let a friend commit murder in <i>ME2</i>, but in <i>ME</i> she saved or exterminated an entire species. But none of these changes, however awful/great, had much effect on the game's writing, which remains the reason I play every game Bioware releases. <br />
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The fight I want to start is about character and consequence. To me, the game nearly sabotages a compelling narrative by allowing players to cruise through conversations with little fear of hard negative outcomes. (You have to try hard to screw up in <i>ME2</i>.) It undermines fine characterization by granting the player too much control over others. (Most people do whatever Shepard wants.) Its greatest moments -- and it's a good game -- come when it revisits older RPG traditions, sets limits on the player's influence, and suggests more than it shows. <br />
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For my money, no section of the game can match Samara's loyalty mission for ambition, wit, or style. I'll try to show, first, where I'm coming from when I talk about <i>Mass Effect</i>, then explain why the Samara sequence expresses the parts of <i>ME2</i> I like the most, and, finally, the ways it represents a missed opportunity. <br />
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<b>I. How <i>Mass Effect</i> Works</b> <br />
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At its core, <i>Mass Effect</i> is a power fantasy. Shepard has a tyrant's gift for shaping the individuals and situations she encounters; by <i>ME2</i>, it's hard to find a corner of the universe that hasn't been touched by the player's influence. Both Paragons and Renegades find themselves in a position of power whenever a significant decision must be made. Naturally, the Normandy's captain will call the shots when it comes to the mission. the interesting part is that (almost) everyone in <i>ME2 </i>invites or allows you to make <i>personal </i>decisions for them. And they respect your judgment no matter how little you care about theirs. <br />
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</div>Once characters join your party in <i>ME2</i>, they mostly stay there. You can be as cruel as you want, and they won't leave or respond with violence, though they may stop responding to sexual advances. Some of these characters, especially the old faces from <i>ME1</i>, are clearly friends; but to her crew Shepard is a very controlling sort of friend. Who they kill or spare, how they get along with each other, the difference in the clothes they wear, the way they talk when spoken to, they're under your thumb, etc.<br />
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Not every RPG works like this, especially within the Bioware canon. <i>Dragon Age </i>took its supporting cast more seriously than any game in recent memory. Every character had his or her own opinions, secrets, and agendas. Morrigan, in the end, was always looking out for number one; Sten aggressively challenged your authority; most of the cast might desert you or fight you to the death if your choices provoked them. Their banter scripts were more than 2009's most hilarious video game dialogue. They made us feel like our party had really lived and traveled together, argued with each other, leered at or despised one another. The writers included so many of these that you'd be hard-pressed to hear them all after beating the game twice. The game didn't match <i>BGII</i>'s dialogue in pure volume, but the presentation was so much stronger, and the voice acting (generally) better, that the party dialogues felt like a new device.<br />
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Player conversations in <i>DA:O</i> were not just a break from dungeon crawling: they were actually their own <i>game</i>. The game was about balancing the message you wanted to send to someone against what they wanted to hear. Characters in <i>DA:O</i> didn't always (or even usually) like flattery; sometimes they wanted to be teased or even yelled at. The player was even scored, via the approval system, on their performance in this game, and the score translated into combat bonuses. Some desirable outcomes later in the story required the player to take a hit to approval in the present, to tell Alistair, Leliana, or Morrigan things they might not want to hear. Sadly, too many in-game gifts let everyone abuse the system. Nevertheless, conversations were a rich, fantastic refinement of the innovations of <i>Baldur's Gate 2</i> and even games like <i>Persona 3 </i>and <i>4</i>.<br />
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I mention this to qualify my claim that characters in <i>Mass Effect 2</i> are easy. Not easy in the sense that you need to give them fewer pieces of cheap junk to get them in bed (though this is surely true). Your party in <i>DA:O</i> was moderately complex/difficult to predict, while the crew in <i>ME2 </i>responds to your choices mostly as expected. If there was a "Conversation Difficulty" option available in the menus for these games, <i>ME2</i> would be set a few notches lower. The tension between what you want from others and what they want to hear is gone. Listening is not an essential skill for players of this game; your words are simply more important than whatever was said while you waited to speak.<br />
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As long as a Paragon or Renegade blue/red dialogue choice is available, you know you can override whatever concern another party has. In two playthroughs, I always had enough alignment juice to use one of the two override options, for nearly every decision I can remember, and I never go pure Paragon or Renegade. Players don't have to choose between building a socially adept character or a masterful combatant any longer; the game makes Shepard deeply influential by default, so you breeze through conversations as easily as the game's combat sections on default difficulty. (Why is the game so much easier than <i>Gears of War</i>, its major combat/level design inspiration?) Some of the game's more emotional choices rang hollow for me when I knew, as soon as I saw that blue or red text, that I couldn't screw them up.<br />
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It's not that the game can't surprise you, but that most of the best shocks are delivered by Shepard herself. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S3NDp0ypeKI/AAAAAAAAABk/cms0v4pxeiM/s1600-h/shepbullet.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S3NDp0ypeKI/AAAAAAAAABk/cms0v4pxeiM/s400/shepbullet.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The most ingenious effect of the series remains the gap between your succinct plans of action and the methods Shepard uses to enact them. In this case, her "advice" for Jack on Pragia was the message I intended,</i> <i>but the practiced brutality in Shepard's delivery turned it into a stunning and audacious scene. The line above is </i><i>both baldfaced crazytalk and a perfect extract of vicious pragmatism. As advice for Jack, it works. And Shepard is right: in </i>Mass Effect<i>, a bullet </i>can<i> solve everything. </i></div><br />
Bioware knows how to build the illusion of an organic, somewhat dysfunctional group, but they chose not to do it<i> </i>with their latest game (they see <i>ME2</i> as a film, so did they view <i>DA:O</i> as a TV show?). Party members barely acknowledge each other; they spend their lives calibrating guns or staring at a wall in Engineering. Apparently their conversations with me are entertainment enough! They sometimes pipe up with interchangeable comments on already-obvious background during missions(1). You'll see two big arguments, each between characters whose backgrounds make them natural enemies. (I've seen longtime friends have shouting matches over whose turn it is to do the dishes that were more devastating than these clashes over serious business.) There are a few Easter eggs, particularly if you travel with Legion. That's about it.<br />
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As they say in Screenwriting 101, character is action. But in <i>ME2</i>, nobody seems able to make a move without Shepard holding their hand (or slapping it), which makes it hard to take them, or the world, seriously. At its worst moments, the game plays more like a wicked ego trip than a serious effort at world-building. Shepard is the center of the <i>ME</i> universe, and the universe exists to make her look good.<br />
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The game's best moments are exceptions to the above trends; they're great scenes that play by their own rules, not Shepard's.<br />
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<b>II. Samara's Mission</b> <br />
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Parent-child interactions in <i>Mass Effect 2</i> get a little tense. You may have noticed! Jacob's father disappoints him, Tali's father misleads her about his dangerous research, Thane abandons his son, and Miranda runs away from her controlling father. I don't suggest some elaborate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_of_influence">anxiety of influence</a> bullshit about the game's status as a sequel, mainly because <i>ME1</i> and <i>ME2</i> were made by the same people, but I think "relationship to your predecessors" is clearly a theme. Samara and Morinth have the most predatory mother-daughter relationship since Flemeth and Morrigan, and their story hit me harder than any of the others.<br />
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Samara is the most visible exception to the things I said above about character in <i>ME2</i>. As a member of an ancient monastic order, she has little use for Shepard's judgment, because her inflexible Justicar code governs all of her decisions. (Whether any code of behavior could be wholly unaffected by the prejudices of its interpreter is likely a question Bioware doesn't want us to ask, and we don't meet any other Justicars to compare Samara to.) She symbolically submits to Shepard's authority, but never allows you to make meaningful decisions <i>for</i> her, the way other characters do(2).<br />
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Samara also happens to be the only notable female character aboard the Normandy who won't sleep with a male Shepard (besides Chakwas; no charge for that mental image). I can't tell you how heartening it was to discover that the "hit on Samara" option had been included in the game only so she could shoot the player down. I don't want to make too much of this, but the rejection provides some needed ego deflation in a game where half the cast is batting their eyelashes at the protagonist. <br />
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Samara's apparent detachment is integral to her personality. Samara's monastic discipline approaches self-effacement, or "self-denial" in Morinth's pointed language (which always hints at an undisclosed but available pleasure). Though Samara calls Shepard a "friend," she mentions casually that had she not taken the Oath of Subsumation, she would have already been forced to kill Shepard(3). Her absolute adherence to a set of precise rules gives her critical distance from other people; she judges them regardless of their feelings toward her and her feelings toward them. She fondly remembers Nihlus, an old enemy, for playing on her Code in order to escape. She maintains her own opinions, in some sort of mental compartment, but (supposedly) never acts on them. It makes for one of the most intriguing portraits of a devout (fanatical, even) individual I've encountered in a game. Sympathetic religious characters are too often simply wise, serious, or impassive.<br />
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You discover that Samara became a Justicar in order to kill her daughter Morinth, who has an unusual genetic condition that makes her a brain-leeching serial killer party animal. Unlike some other loyalty quests (Jacob's, for instance) briefly introduced aboard the Normandy, Samara's mission starts building as soon as Shepard meets her. As you learn, Samara only ventured outside Asari space in order to pursue Morinth, whom the Eclipse mercenaries on Illium vaguely mention as some monster they've smuggled offworld. Samara's pursuit of Morinth has gone on for almost half her lifetime, so the player knows the stakes are high. <br />
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Samara's task is further distinguished from other missions in that Shepard/the player is uniquely qualified to perform it. In loyalty missions for Zaeed and Thane, Shepard isn't much more than competent hired muscle, or half of a buddy-cop team; for Garrus and Tali, you're a trusted old friend or a captain (and they've got some nerve not starting the game loyal to Shepard, after saving the galaxy with her before); for others, you're half-enforcer, half moral compass. But Samara needs to bait her trap for Morinth with a person who has two very specific skills: force of will and a talent for <i>role playing</i>.<br />
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Before I drop the word "self-referential" and horrify everyone, let me go over the mission. After Samara gives you the heads-up about her daughter, you travel to Illium and play amateur detective in the apartment of one of Morinth's victims, Nef. Shepard and Samara talk to Nef's distraught mother, who asks you to kill Morinth to avenge her daughter. This effective stakes-raising scene (which introduces another mother-daughter pair) turns the quest into more than a favor for a friend, and the player begins to feel they have some responsibility for stopping Morinth. Samara warned you that Morinth was destructive by nature, and now you see what she meant -- a corpse couldn't say this as well as the surviving mother and Nef's diaries do.<br />
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(It's odd that Samara accompanies you on the visit, as you'd think those who knew Morinth's victims would likely confuse the mother with her identical daughter, which Samara would want to avoid. However, this would ruin the surprise currently in place, when you come face-to-face with Morinth for the first time and see the resemblance yourself.)<br />
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Once you find that Morinth frequents the Afterlife VIP area, Samara outlines a series of rules the player must follow to attract her. Trying to pick up a strange girl in a bar is itself an unusual activity in video gaming, and here it's compounded by a host of ironies, not least of which is Samara's coaching. Of course, Samara will approach the problem with a list of guidelines; she views her own life as the performance of a set of rules.<br />
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After receiving Samara's directions, players must act the part they've been given. Morinth doesn't want a bully, but she wants a killer; she doesn't want "chivalry," but she wants charisma. In a neat touch, we learn that Morinth preys on creative individuals, and will notice Shepard because she is "an artist in battle." The scenario works as a neat reversal of show-don't-tell storytelling, because it lets you get to know Morinth before you ever meet her. And you don't even realize this has happened, really, because it is so ingrained in you, as a gamer, that you must focus on these rules and follow them to satisfy the game.<br />
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Once inside Afterlife, the player completes miniature quests, but only the correct actions bring you closer to Morinth; as Samara suggests, picking a fight with a random jerk on the dancefloor won't get you far. It's a clever game-within-a-game, and it's one of the only times in <i>Mass Effect 2 </i>where your success depends on your understanding of other characters. Although you're given enough information to make the task easy, it still reminds of those <i>DA:O </i>conversations, or the <i>Baldur's Gate 2</i> romances, where consideration of other individuals counted for something. <br />
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The bar sequence also stands out as just about the only role-playing most players will do in <i>Mass Effect 2</i>. It's a performance, first and foremost, like the low-level acting gamers used to do, in a bygone era, when they consciously affected the personality of their character. It's a bit of a joke, I think, to combine the performative acts of gender at play in a sexy pick-up scene with the hoary, nerd-steeped traditions of role playing. In the past, RPGs sometimes encouraged the latter by giving players a detailed background and many options during character creation. If you play the old <i>Fallout</i> games with an INT below 8, for example, your character will speak like the moron she is. Games can also organically build a sense of character by reminding players of the consequences of their actions, so that the choices they've made will, by the end of the game, clarify a hazy template into something emotionally meaningful. <i>Mass Effect 2 </i>doesn't really do either of these things, but it does present clever scenarios, like these bar mini-quests, that partly make up for it.<br />
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Why claim there's no role playing in <i>ME</i>? Some players I know will select all Paragon or all Renegade dialogue options for their entire run, but this activity is brainlessly automated by the conversation wheel, which drains the ambiguity from decision-making. When I play <i>ME</i> games, I tend to balance my desire to achieve best outcomes through pragmatic choices against my drive to screw over characters I dislike as hard as I can. It isn't role-playing, exactly. But it's the pattern I fall into when the narrative of the game isn't built on some bedrock of consequences that would force me to respect the diegesis. The Samara quest stands apart, though, both as a witty reminder of what role-playing is about, and as a sequence that actually leads to a harsh, compelling choice. <br />
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If you play your part adequately, Morinth appears. She appears to be wearing the same clothes that Shiala wore on Feros in <i>ME1</i>, probably a coincidental recycling of assets from the first game. Shepard's initial conversation with her is, perhaps intentionally, extremely shallow. You name-drop artists, bands, and TV shows you know Morinth likes, then compare notes about your interest in all things sinister. The scene would have played better if the player had been required to do some guesswork, but sadly it's nothing but regurgitating a few names when prompted. <br />
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One of the loading screens in <i>ME2 </i>claims that each loyalty mission plays to its featured character's strengths. And missions' style, not simply their combat elements, do seem to suit their givers. (Miranda's mission is flashy and shallow, while Jacob's mission seems like half of a good concept.) Again, Samara's quest throws in a twist, in that its style fits <i>both</i> Samara and Morinth, because they each turn out to be a potential crewmember. The mission opens with a request for bloody vengeance from Nef's mother, suggesting that the correct course would be to follow the Justicar example of summary execution for the wicked. As detailed above, Shepard is then given an explicit set of rules to follow, in a rough imitation of Samara's mode of action. But inside Afterlife the focus shifts to emulation of Morinth. You meet Morinth, the game's consummate liar -- the one person who remains gloriously insincere in every conversation with Shepard she ever has -- by deceiving her about your intentions. (At the end of the mission, Morinth reveals that she herself is an actor of no ordinary talent.) And after you leave with Morinth, the conversation turns into an open contest for dominance, which is, again, what she's all about. <br />
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You're taken to Morinth's apartment, which is decorated with a number of trophies from former lovers/victims (oddly Batcave-esque). According to Samara's instructions, you're supposed to pretend to fall under Morinth's influence. It's worth remembering Samara's entire plan: she gives Shepard detailed instructions on how to seduce her rapacious daughter, with the expectation that Samara will burst in at the last minute to cockblock and then kill Morinth. Again, I won't advance a rickety Lacanian theory about the forms of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Father">parental prohibition</a> and rebellion going on (it might make a tortuous kind of sense, as Samara is technically neither male or female, Morinth is identical to her mother yet perversely opposite in thinking, "Morinth" is apparently not the original name Samara gave her, etc.) I'm just struck by how odd the Samara-Morinth relationship is by itself. In video games, where narratives tend to be more generic and less creative than in any other major medium, strangeness is next to godliness.<br />
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Morinth keeps trophies in her apartment because she's a hunter. Samara calls Morinth a "predator" and tells Shepard that "the hunt interests her as much as the conquest." Morinth isn't the only hunter in <i>ME2</i>; both Thane and Samara are described as such, though Samara's quarry is Morinth herself. Samara and Thane rationalize violent action through religious convictions, but Morinth is an unapologetic "hedonist" addicted to her sexual brain-draining routine and the power over others it gives her. The contrast in their styles of hunting suggests that Samara is the most selfless character in <i>ME2</i>, Morinth the most selfish. While Bioware packed your <i>ME2 </i>crew with Renegade types, Morinth seems the greatest outsider, her actions not driven by revenge or insecurity or whatever, but by a nature deeply contrary to the institutions and social norms of Asari or any galactic society. <br />
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Because Morinth's killing routine depends on her dominant position, she and Shepard have a serious disagreement. I said earlier that Samara was one of the only characters not subject to Shepard's decisions; Morinth is the other major exception. As far as Shepard's good judgment goes, Morinth's interested only in overriding it to get what she wants. This naturally conflicts with the fantasy of control that composes most of the game, where events are rarely out of the player's hands(4). In Morinth's apartment, this jockeying for position manifests as a series of alignment checks:<br />
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If you pass every check without feigning obedience (which Samara told you to do) Samara will burst in and kick off a Gandalf v. Saruman wizard duel. The final check requires around 75% Paragon or Renegade status, so some players miss it if they play Samara's mission early. If you fail the last check, Samara and Morinth reach a deadlock and Shepard assists Samara, who quickly finishes Morinth. If you pass the last check, Shepard decides who to kill.<br />
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Naturally, there's no resolution where both Samara and Morinth can live. As characters, they both have extreme -- nearly absolute -- needs that pit them against each other and prevent Shepard from influencing them. In another story their stark opposition might become ridiculous, but in <i>ME2</i> they stand out for acting, violently, on their personal animosity. It's an unfortunate byproduct of <i>ME2</i>'s structure that most other characters' needs appear to be one mission deep. You accompany someone on one crucial personal mission, more or less solve their issues with some advice, and then, unless they're romanceable, they're pretty much done playing an active role in the story. But the conflict between Samara and Morinth shaped both their lives, and talking them out of a violent resolution is impossible. It seems entirely <i>right</i> that you must kill one of them, because they are each immovable.<br />
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Why save Morinth? No sane person could imagine she'd be more useful on a galaxy-saving mission than Samara. Yet to me, Morinth was a welcome throwback, a return to a venerable RPG tradition that has fallen into disrepair -- the Truly Evil party member. They were a dime-a-dozen in Black Isle and Bioware classics, but where are your Edwins, Xzars, Korgans, Ignuses, and Viconias today(5)? Everybody loved those characters. Even playing Neutral or Good, evil people were a blast to have around. But for some reason, as production values went up, the sociopaths and lunatics began to drop out of gaming. Some claim that a convincing evil character is hard to write, what with fully voiced roles and today's greater focus on characters' backgrounds and motivations. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Centuries of literature have shown that evil people have more fun; just ask Milton or Dickens or Chaucer. And given the number of weak or unconvincing do-gooders who constantly appear in games, we could do with some over-the-top nasty individuals. With the occasional concession of a literally inhuman figure like HK-47 or Shale -- again, among the most fondly remembered characters from their games -- modern RPGs are sorely lacking in Vitamin E. <br />
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There's my extra-textual reason for killing Samara: I'd rather play an interesting game than a nice one. My goal is to experience not the happiest but the best story the game has to offer. I hoped a willfully bad person like Morinth would create further problems to deal with, and even shake up the static social space aboard the Normandy. She appeals exactly because of her lack of deference toward Shepard, and her air of false intimacy more insidious than outright hostility. As I said before, Morinth is the one <i>ME2</i> character who will always lie and never stop playing head games. Samara joined your crew because her Code apparently has a "must accept impossible missions" clause -- which may explain why you don't see many Justicars around -- and because of her previous knowledge of the Collectors. Morinth will join the crew because she wants to give Shepard a fatal brain hemorrhage. ("Romance" has rarely seemed so euphemistic as on the <a href="http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Romance">wiki page</a> that includes Morinth.)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>The hilarious bit is that you actually can agree to sleep with Morinth after beating the Collectors, and she will kill Shepard. I cannot really imagine the mentality of a player who lacks the basic grasp of pattern recognition to see this coming, but apparently they exist, judging from outraged forum posts on the subject. Their delicious tears remind of those shed by people who ran sidequests before going through Omega-4, and were shocked, shocked! when they arrived late and saw their captured crewmen liquidated by nefarious insects. Bioware has mentioned that they're <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26937/BioWares_Cho_On_CriticProofing_Mass_Effect_2.php">probably too sensitive</a> to criticism from vocal members of their fan base, and it would kill me if they eliminated the few consequences their game has. The only people who encountered these slight punishments were those who missed every hint, who had been so coddled by an easy game that they really thought they could do no wrong. A better game would give players <i>many more</i> opportunities to fail, not fewer.<br />
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To find the most poignant detail of Samara's mission, you need to listen to both Samara and Morinth afterward (in separate saves) when they talk about each other. Morinth gloats, remembering her defiance of her "terrible mother" and the discipline she represented:<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For Morinth it's a triumph because she loves upsetting expectations, particularly her mother's, and she would like to consider herself the complete victor. But she's entirely wrong, and Samara was never disappointed. Samara remembers the "bravest and smartest" of her children:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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These conclusions are simply <i>right</i> for this pair of characters. Samara's emotions remain separate from her actions, and she continues to judge Morinth by her ability and intelligence, rather than the way she treats others. Morinth does the opposite, recalling nothing but the injustices done to herself. Part of what I like about this contrast is the way it wouldn't come naturally to another medium: you only get the full story, and the character note about Morinth, if you've played the game both ways. Outright gimmickry in other media, in <i>Run Lola Run</i> structures, would be needed to compete with the elegant multiple narratives that separate playthroughs in games can provide. <br />
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<b>III. A Brief Story About <i>Baldur's Gate</i></b><br />
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The original <i>Baldur's Gate</i> had a funny quest that reminds me more than a little of Morinth's kiss of death. Anyone remember Shoal the Nereid?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S359w571McI/AAAAAAAAADM/SjCH68RHjpM/s1600-h/shoal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S359w571McI/AAAAAAAAADM/SjCH68RHjpM/s200/shoal.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>In 1998, I was 12 and this was awesome.</i></div><br />
Travel West of High Hedge, and you'll find Shoal in the middle of a forest. When you talk to her, as any good adventurer will talk to all strangers encountered in the woods, she insists on kissing you. If you try to get out of it, she'll go ahead anyway. When she kisses you, you die. Your head will sometimes explode in a gory mess. There's no saving roll. And when your main character dies in <i>BG</i>, it's game over. All because you said you'd help her out. <br />
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When you had your whole party selected in <i>BG</i>, as you did while traveling, clicking on a neutral NPC made your main character speak to them by default. Bioware knew that pretty much <i>every person</i> who traveled West of High Hedge would get a Game Over the first time they met Shoal, unless they were deeply paranoid. The only way to complete the quest is to have someone else in your party talk to Shoal first, and then defeat her with your living characters, then go kill an ogre for her.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S36DzZn1JaI/AAAAAAAAADU/GkoKTQ1y24o/s1600-h/bgtext.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="136" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S36DzZn1JaI/AAAAAAAAADU/GkoKTQ1y24o/s400/bgtext.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Minsc takes one for the team.</i></div><br />
<i>BG</i>'s raw weirdness is often surprising, and people who played it on release remain delighted with stuff like this. I'm not implying that <i>BG </i>is a better game than <i>ME2</i>; the former requires the patience of a saint to beat. But in a way it had much more respect for its players than <i>ME2 </i>does. <i>BG </i>required persistence, and even some ingenuity, to complete this single random quest. It risked outraging players because it wanted to put them into a unique situation and get them thinking differently. It killed the player from within the RPG's most secure space, the sheltering branches of the dialogue tree, and not even for saying the wrong thing, but for talking to the wrong person. But it wasn't a frustrating, game-killing moment. I'd guess that when Shoal killed them, most <i>BG </i>players did not seethe with rage at the unfairness of it all. They probably laughed, like I did.<br />
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Morinth can kill Shepard in a similar way, but there are so many warnings beforehand that the player would need to be the world's champion idiot to miss them. In <i>BG</i>, a strange character kills you without warning, for a reason you won't understand until you do her quest; <i>ME2</i> all but asks you to sign a waiver before risking your life. Are gamers really that delicate? <i>ME2</i> is so concerned with being <i>fair</i> to the player that it becomes less interesting. I'm not sure why Morinth, unlike Shoal, needs consent; I expected to face a maze of tricky dialogue, at least, to survive a conversation with her. The absence of a serious threat from this supposedly lethal personality damages the narrative's credibility. <br />
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Mention difficulty in games and you invite a casual vs. hardcore shouting match. But there's really no question that some of the events that most enliven a game's setting and story are by nature unfair, odd, or cruel. A surprise is, by definition, something the player isn't prepared for; if set in a harsh world, a game's surprises should sometimes kill. Nobody wants to play <i>Demon's Souls</i> every day, but they like to find a world stranger than their expectations.<br />
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<b>IV. Issues</b><br />
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The Samara/Morinth mission is a great piece of game writing and design. If the rest of <i>ME2 </i>was entirely planet scanning and hacking, I would still tell my friends to play it for that sequence alone. As it is, many other sections of the game are great in their own right, particularly the conclusion.<br />
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I was tempted to go with a more grandiose title, "The Best Story Bioware Ever Told," to describe this excellent segment of the game. But the mission is really too contained, too out-of-step with the rest of the game, to rate a comparison to the best moments in <i>BG2</i> or <i>DA:O</i>. I can't mention Morinth without bitching about the game's lame follow-up to this quest. Unless the player tries to have sex with her, recruiting Morinth has no effect on the game's narrative. What was the point of introducing a great character if she never does anything?<br />
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There's a problem that begins with the structure of the Samara mission itself. Isn't it missing its proper ending? It seems like Nef's mother should confront you again, before you're whisked back to your ship for a mission summary screen. She played an important role in the story's setup, then she disappears. In another RPG, you might talk to her again to collect your quest XP, but <i>ME2 </i>awards experience automatically. Nef's mother wants Morinth dead more than anything, so she would want to know about your progress.<br />
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I went back to Nef's apartment with Morinth in tow to see what would happen. Could she impersonate Samara in front of Nef's mother? Would Morinth feel any remorse at all? Would the game succeed in guilt-tripping me about saving Morinth's life? Unfortunately, nothing happened; you can't open the door to Nef's apartment, or ever speak to Nef's mother, after recruiting Morinth. She's just a loose end.<br />
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When you pick Morinth, Samara says "you will regret this." I wish the game <i>had</i> made me regret it. Morinth did promise not to hurt the Normandy's crew, but her promises don't mean much. She's been hunting, deceiving, and killing others for kicks for hundreds of years; why take a break now? I expected to return to the Normandy one day to find that she'd popped Jacob's head open like a juice-box, and the rest of the crew was preparing to vent her into space. (That would take one hell of a Renegade speech to prevent.) Of course, nothing like that occurs, and crew interactions remain mostly nonexistent.<br />
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This isn't just a special point about my favorite character in <i>ME2</i>. It's also true of <i>your</i> favorite character. Like all of the game's supporting cast, they never did much. They are each kept in their own sealed box, and almost never give a hint that they interact organically with their surroundings or other characters. They get let of their boxes once, for their moment in the sun, in a loyalty mission. It's deeply formulaic, as if the designers were uncomfortable devoting resources to specific characters, as was done in <i>DA:O</i>. They passed up many of the conflicts, rivalries, and mysteries that television and film writers would develop if given a scenario where all these insane people lived together in the same ship.<br />
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The conceit that Morinth can imitate Samara is nice, or it would be, if it wasn't a thin excuse for recycling Samara's appearance, voice, and dialogue instead of creating unique content for Morinth. The concept could be great if they let a writer run with it. A perverse hedonist trapped in a perpetual charade as a severe, highly disciplined monk? That is black comedy <i>gold</i>. Won't she get bored? Won't she slip up sometimes, and say sinister, inappropriate things? Won't she be closer at times to a grotesque parody of Samara than a note-perfect imitator? Isn't she just going to invent rules off the top of her head when somebody asks about that thousand-sutra Code, which she hasn't actually memorized? Aren't other asari going to ask her, as a Justicar, for help (and won't she be compelled to help them, as part of the act)? Couldn't an old acquaintance of Samara's run into her? Morinth should really have her own loyalty mission, as she currently isn't "loyal" to Shepard at all, in the conventional sense of loyal as "not interested in murdering." <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S4Vtb3FSsGI/AAAAAAAAADs/CW2r6BgUadc/s1600-h/haha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S4Vtb3FSsGI/AAAAAAAAADs/CW2r6BgUadc/s400/haha.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>I hoped she would kill Joker at least.</i></div><br />
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Contrary to popular belief/marketing, consequences for decisions made in <i>ME2</i> are few and far between. You might save a NPC's life in a loyalty mission, but you won't see them again. I've rarely encountered a narrative payoff as slight as the emails those ingrates sent me. Most decisions are dangling threads that later games may or may not address. If you claim, say, that telling Mordin to cure the Krogan genophage was a meaningful decision, you're simply imagining that there <i>might </i>be some satisfying effect represented in <i>ME3</i>. Who knows? The designers could give you another reminder about it (as they teased the results of your <i>ME1</i> choices with random NPCs on Illium in <i>ME2</i>) but never really resolve it until <i>Mass Effect Side Story Sigma</i> or whatever game they're planning to make after they finish the trilogy.<br />
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All relevant dialogue and narrative sense in <i>ME2</i> told me that bad shit would go down if I saved Morinth. But nothing happens! She will even hold the biotic shield for you on the Collector mothership, a task requiring dedication to the safety of others over one's own safety, and this noted psychopath will do it <i>just as well </i>as her noble, self-sacrificing mother. (Nobody dies.) It makes a joke of the game's ending, which depends entirely on the player's belief that their choices of certain characters for certain tasks actually mattered. Never promise consequences if you cannot deliver them. <i> </i><br />
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At this point, Bioware/EA must realize that carrying over details from a save file, however superficial, are excellent bait for gamers, and they could string people along forever. We're taking it on faith that our Big Decisions will someday manifest in a form greater than a few lines of dialogue, as the aftermath of most <i>ME1 </i>decisions appeared in <i>ME2</i>. Consequences for our actions in these games have been a hope so deferred that the finale of <i>ME3</i> carries an air of millennial expectation, wherein all our Shepards' sins must be tallied against her good deeds in a great Judgment, the sum of which will be Happy or Bad End. At this point I demand to see the Thorian returned in Shiala fighting the Reapers alongside a Rachni horde accompanied by a rejuvenated Krogan population riding to battle on the backs of all the bastards who thanked me via email. And there should also be griffins, because every good story has them.<br />
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(1) On Horizon, Miranda: "The Illusive Man was correct. Collectors are agents of the Reapers." Repeat mission with Jack. Jack: "Shit! The Illusive Man was right! The Collectors answer to the Reapers." Do you really give a fuck about Reapers, Jack? I asked before what you thought of the mission, and you didn't seem to care at all about the particulars.<br />
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(2) You don't need to ask Grunt to join Clan Urdnot, you can just tell him to. You can convince party members like Jacob, Miranda, Mordin and Garrus not to kill their targets. In Thane's mission, there's no real dilemma for the player to solve. Zaeed is a half-implemented paperweight on the Normandy, so I don't consider him a real member of the crew.<br />
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(3) This seems to be alignment-sensitive, but the <i>ME2 </i>wiki claims she will tell Paragons that she still "might" have to kill them later if they get out of line during the mission.<br />
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(4) The player's inability to force some party members from <i>ME1</i> to rejoin their group is another commendable "it's not all about you" moment.<br />
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(5) Some stickler may point out that Ignus was Chaotic Neutral, but he was a black-hearted bastard and everyone knows it. Also, some might claim that Loghain was a recruitable evil character in <i>DA:O</i>, but he was a pretty reasonable guy once you got to know him.<br />
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<i>Email me at post.hype@gmail.com.</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-82417910896468751912010-03-06T11:56:00.000-08:002010-03-06T12:42:35.942-08:00The Future Is A Grind<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S5Kt80D2CKI/AAAAAAAAAD0/MgKZUYX7gI0/s1600-h/otgrind.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S5Kt80D2CKI/AAAAAAAAAD0/MgKZUYX7gI0/s320/otgrind.JPG" /></a></div>Jesse Schell's <a href="http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/">DICE presentation</a> has been circulating recently, and clever responses have <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/28/counting-for-taste/">already been written</a>. Nevertheless, I'd like to break it down one more time to discuss why it conflicts so strongly with the creative impulses we gamers benefit from.<br />
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His advice is like telling novelists that they could learn a lot from marketing copy. Advertisements are much smarter and more efficient about their use of words than novels are, right? Ads get their hooks into people right away, play on their anxieties and dreams, and move product fast; books take a while to get going, don't sell themselves so well, and appeal to niche audiences. People supposedly value books for their "escapism," but advertisements are making crazy money by relating to people's real lives. I predict that in the future, every book will be written on the back of a cereal box, and the toy inside the box will be a merchandising tie-in. <br />
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Schell gears his presentation to the business side of games: he isn't talking about "good" or "fun" game ideas, but ideas that will make the publishers/designers in his audience rich. Why do we spend time thinking of awesome concepts, he asks, when instead we could be getting gamers hooked early on some powerful stuff, exploiting "psychological locks and keys" that will leave kids fiending for more time in Club Penguin? He advises "skilled game designers" to adopt the concepts that have allowed lucky amateurs to cash in on Facebook.<br />
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I doubt Schell himself likes these sorts of games. He pointedly leaves out discussion of quality or taste, because the only goal here is wealth. He spends the first third of his presentation in exaggerated disbelief over the profits social games make, then ties them to other far-flung concepts like Xbox Live Achievements. "People are insane" about Achievements, Schell says, and I agree -- I also cannot understand the obsessive-compulsive drives that lead people to care about their Gamerscores, which debase every accomplishment by aggregating them in a form devoid of context. But he goes on to imply that designers should do more to emulate Achievements, not because he likes them in any way, but because they prey on the compulsive tendencies that some individuals have. <br />
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I think avoiding that route is a matter of taste, or pride, rather than an ethical issue. Let me assert that many designers <i>actually care</i> about making good games. Most got into the industry because they liked playing games. They get upset when reviewers trash their work, but they also feel lousy if they realize they've made an awful game that they would never play themselves. Hellish crunch periods are (and should be) the major issue with current game development practices, but designers also have a very typical human anxiety: that they might be wasting their lives in a job that produces only disposable experiences, and they would prefer to create something that's worth a damn. They don't want to create a thin crust of "game" to cover an XP dispenser. They want to entertain people, not addict them.<br />
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It seems lofty to talk about creativity in the game industry, which is a business. But businesspeople interested in long-term success (i.e. the goodwill of their audience) will find a compromise between art and industry. Hollywood has always been obsessed with profit, particularly after banks got heavily involved in studio operations; yet great directors, like Hawks or Welles, managed to create forceful, personal works within the assembly-line system the studio had in place. (The MGM logo even contains the motto "art for art's sake" -- a pose, maybe, but the phrase seems more at home above "MGM" than it would next to "EA.") As Jim Rossignol points out in the article linked above, games are free to borrow from literature, film, and other media. The industry can keep getting better, and try to create games that can stand beside the great works in other formats. The game industry has never produced its own <i>Magnificent Ambersons</i>, or <i>Middlemarch</i>, but if it takes Schell's advice, it never will. <br />
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<div style="margin: 0px;">I dislike Lee Sheldon's grading system as well. It seems to shift away from rewarding creative and fluent work, and toward allowing students to grind up good grades out of regular attendance and diligent hand-raising ("building off what she said, I'd like to add..."). Schell claims that Sheldon got more students to show up for class, but doesn't their work count for more than their capacity to be talked at? Why doesn't Schell mention better test scores or paper grades, instead of the most superficial measures of academic success?</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0px;">Sheldon's syllabus reminds me of those JRPGs where any sufficiently patient/obsessed player can grind to level 99. It's interesting that Schell thinks this XP system an improvement on the standard American grading method, but considers no alternative systems. The Oxbridge system is the inverse of Sheldon's design -- his more casual grading system converts to an RPG status screen, but Oxford students are ranked on a hardcore action score table. At Oxford, at least in English Lit, it's difficult to score above 70, and very hard to go over 73-75 on an essay or class (with some variation in tutors). This absolute scale is sort of an illusion, as any score over 70 (as I remember) converts to an alpha/A, but it has a powerful effect. Students in the US will often hit the roof of the grading system for their class, at A, and discover the level of effort required of them; ambitious Oxford students are motivated to pour ever more time and thought into their work if they want to chase high scores. It's the difference between achieving competence at an arcade game -- the ability to play some time without dying and get your quarter's worth -- and pushing yourself to secure a spot on the list of high scores. You may only be beating your friends, but it still matters. There will always be some legendary jackass who got an 80, or some other achievement you can never match, but the pursuit is what compels you. Sheldon's system feels more open, friendly, and easy than traditional US grades, and the Oxbridge system more obscure, elitist, and hard(1). As a hardcore gamer, I prefer elitism; I want the difference between everyday accomplishments and exceptional ones to be recognized.</div><div style="margin: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin: 0px;">(Of course, the memory of the work you did in school is what counts, not the marks your teachers left on it. But so long as those marks encourage better essays, the system is worth talking about.) </div><div></div><br />
Schell also proposes that Facebook games succeed due to their symbiotic relationship to their player's real lives, and that in the future, real life will be invaded by RPG experience-collecting systems. He confounds various sorts of "realism," from advertising claims to reality television to cinematic depictions, as if they were all doing the same thing. Schell really goes full implausible when suggesting that <i>Avatar </i>grossed big because it asked deep questions about technology's interaction with reality. Anyone who insists that <i>Avatar </i>was intellectually engaging may be living in a dream world themselves, or trying to sell you their new book called <i>Avatar and Philosophy</i>. (So uh, why wasn't <i>demonlover</i> the highest grossing film of 2002? Why did <i>The Phantom Menace </i>outgross <i>eXistenZ</i> in 1999? Those movies must do huge business on DVD if consumers are now so preoccupied with the intersection of technology and reality, amirite?) It's a bit like claiming <i>Gears of War</i> was a success because of its bold prediction of future directions in architecture and urban planning. You can find that in the game, maybe, but who really believes that's what drew people to it?<br />
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Schell suggests that consumers "hunger for reality" and "self-sufficiency." As a multimedia addict, I don't see self-sufficiency as much of a driving force in my own life, and I'm not inclined to take Schell's word for it that everyone else cares more than I do. (I'm also not sure why he brings up a straw-man convergence theory as a possible counter to his reality/authenticity argument, and then dismisses it, when convergence seems to have no relation to authenticity at all?) Consumers may want authenticity, but what do they mean by "authentic"? It's in that group of words, like "realism" or "natural," that have been used to justify or condemn every work of art under the sun at different points in history, and never have a precise meaning. Schell's belief that some <i>Walden</i>esque revival will actually drive us to spend all their waking hours appeasing abstract score systems devised by advertisers and government initiatives is singularly perverse. Wouldn't mass desire for "authenticity" lead to anything <i>but</i> acceptance of a corporate invasion of private life?<br />
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As a thought experiment, Schell's vision of the future is disturbing and thought-provoking. As a prediction, much of it seems suspect. Some of the scoring is hard to imagine: what could it possibly mean to get a high score on a piano performance? Will the computer program mark you down for playing "too mechanically"? I don't believe that this future could work to improve people, as suggested in the presentation, because it would rarely benefit corporations to encourage self-reflection. Even Schell's example doesn't really make sense to me. How does it benefit Amazon to reward you for reading a book to the end? Wouldn't they prefer it if you quit reading things halfway through, then went shopping for more? If they really wanted to maximize turnover, they would front-load early chapters with achievements so that Bookscore junkies could get their points fast and continue buying up inventory. Owen Good's <a href="http://kotaku.com/5422154/achievement-chore-she-plays-for-gamerscore-whether-its-fun-or-not">article on CRU, a top Achievement grinder,</a> showed that she cared little, if at all, about most of the games she played. How could turning reading into the same sort of soul-sucking numbers game benefit readers? They won't care that their 500th novel was a <i>Star Trek</i> book, any more than CRU cares that a <i>Spongebob</i> game took her over 165,000 points. <br />
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Schell seems to think his vision is inevitable -- "what's gonna stop it?" he asks. I have a few suggestions:<br />
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<b>1. Burnout</b>. There's a reason that "grind" is one of the ugliest words in the gaming lexicon. To me a MMO is a game I play hardcore for a couple of months, then quit while hating it more strongly than I hate any other game in the world. As soon as I become halfway competent at the task I've been preparing for -- tanking endgame instances in <i>WoW:TBC</i>, or skirmish PvP in <i>Eve</i> -- I realize that the carrot dangled in front of my nose from the beginning has always been rotting garbage, and I quit. I'm certainly not inclined to play another MMO for a while afterward, and I know people who have never gone back to MMOs after their first cycle of addiction and disillusionment. I imagine Schell's MMOish future hellscape would work much the same way for me. You could probably trick me into grinding Dr. Pepper points for five days straight, but I would never touch another goddamn Dr. Pepper after that. I'm not sure advertisers will be eager to incentivize a short-term, intense interest in their products if they find consumers are violently repulsed by the thought of their products afterward.<br />
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<b>2. Sensors</b>. Would we really accept machines that track eye movements and do everything short of reading minds into our households? If you're one of the paranoids running NoScript, Adblock, Tor, Privoxy, and Vidalia, would you ever let this happen? If the motion control gimmick grows old and dies, as the <i>Guitar Hero</i> concept has, won't all these sensors be left collecting dust like so many plastic instruments?<br />
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<b>3. Divergence. </b>Schell's takedown of the theory of technological convergence is persuasive. It's strange, then, that he then bases all of his predictions for the future on an unstated premise of <i>conceptual convergence</i>. He asserts that technology diverges and splits infinitely, but forgets that ideas also diverge and split infinitely. New ideas inspire contrary ideas and waves of dissent and apathy. The concept of grinding stats will not conquer and reshape society. Many people will never be enticed by the thought of increasing values in a spreadsheet. If the idea of grind continues to spread, as it has been spreading through the Facebook games Schell points out, some of his predictions may turn out right. But the idea will not be inescapable. Would it really matter if there were sensors in your television, if you watch all your TV on your computer?<br />
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<b>4. Greed</b>. A thousand pitfalls await corporations that implement these systems, because when you introduce game-like incentive models, people exploit them. Does anyone remember the massive <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/search/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001092">wave of cheating and botting</a> that followed Microsoft's announcement that they would offer real rewards for people playing Live Search Club games? This development shouldn't have surprised anyone familiar with RPG communities, where power gamers discover exploits and quick-leveling tricks that break a game's intended progression. Devise a sensor that tracks people's eye movements during commercials and rewards them with points, and someone else will write a howto about setting up a pendulum that tricks the sensor into thinking you watch TV 24 hours a day. If no tangible rewards are in place, consumers won't care about these systems; if rewards actually are attractive, then people will manipulate the system to gain more points more quickly than designers intended. I don't think that all consumers yearn to be free, or anything like that. I just believe that people are greedy, and they like to cheat the system. Introduce an incentive structure, and people will <i>game it</i>. <br />
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(1) Boring personal detail: I describe this system as I experienced it while studying abroad, reading English Lit, and it works differently in some ways for many Oxford students. I was graded on my essays and performance in one-on-one tutorials, not the final essay exams that are all-important for many students. Because our work was graded on the same (pseudo-)absolute scale as everyone else's work, I think my description of the system remains accurate. Reported (possibly mythical) "high scores" came up in conversations with foreign students and Oxford students alike. <br />
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<i>Email me at post.hype@gmail.com.</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3403386358986154242.post-60134592586321161492010-01-30T20:05:00.000-08:002010-03-15T13:53:07.835-07:00Don't Call Uncharted 2 A Film<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Why do game critics keep calling <i>Uncharted 2</i> a movie, and grandly insisting that it ranks among the year's best films? Kotaku's writers recently <a href="http://kotaku.com/5446689/2009-game-of-the-year-finalist-debate-uncharted-2">repeated this claim</a>, with Luke Plunkett arguing <i>Uncharted 2</i> was "2009's best action movie" and Mike Fahey claiming it could "easily stand toe-to-toe with any action movie"; other critics have <a href="http://www.gamesradar.com/ps3/uncharted-2-among-thieves/review/uncharted-2-among-thieves-review/a-2009091875511998094/g-200812159395546092">said</a> <a href="http://www.gamepro.com/article/reviews/212273/uncharted-2-among-thieves/">many</a> <a href="http://origin.avclub.com/articles/uncharted-2-among-thieves,33912/">similar</a> <a href="http://www.pushsquare.com/7624/uncharted-2-among-thieves-puts-a-number-of-hollywood-movies-to-shame-twiggy-the-pushsquare-opinionator/">things</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Granted, <i>Uncharted 2</i> leads gaming's current push toward more heavily scripted, spectacle-driven design. It uses the common tricks employed by <i>Gears of War</i> and other games to mimic camera focus (you know, the effects you turned off to get better visibility). The voice acting and script are highly professional. But comparing the whole production to a great movie, or to any movie, is insane. To its fans, the game's modest narrative is a masterwork, its stock characters are rare orders, and the whole experience rivals <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> as popular entertainment. But as much as <i>Uncharted 2</i> imitates the movie aesthetic, it remains a game; if you judge it on the same terms you would a film’s narrative, it comes up short. Comparing <i>Uncharted 2 </i>to a good film is unfair and ridiculous, but many game critics have insisted that their readers should make the comparison, so I will. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2S7KjVluoI/AAAAAAAAAAM/8YR6LEtAqVk/s1600-h/hurt-locker-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2S7KjVluoI/AAAAAAAAAAM/8YR6LEtAqVk/s400/hurt-locker-1.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><o:p>The Hurt Locker <i>is a great action movie. </i>Uncharted 2<i> isn't. </i></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><o:p><br />
</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Everyone does remember the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/movies/awardsseason/10darg.html?scp=3&sq=The%20Hurt%20Locker&st=cse">awesome film</a> <i>The Hurt Locker, </i>which succeeds as both an action movie and a character study, released in 2009, right? Everyone does remember the indelible moments found in great action films -- Bruce Willis walking barefoot over broken glass in <i>Die Hard</i>, Indiana Jones <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJOXLryzs8g">demonstrating his impatience</a> in <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i>, Schwarzenegger intoning "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqdxy43ctaA">I'll be back</a>" in <i>Terminator</i>, the exhausting, virtuoso horizontal hallway fight in <i>Oldboy</i>, etc. etc. List continues forever. But I can't think of a single sequence or gag in <i>Uncharted 2 </i>that displayed the sheer imagination, grit, or power I remember from those films. At its best the game gives you capably rendered spectacle -- oh shit, a helicopter's chasing me; oh shit, this building is falling down; oh shit, this bridge is collapsing -- recycled from games and other media. You can't help but notice that you've seen it done before, and done better, at the movies.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Uncharted 2<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">owes more to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> than to any other film. Watch the well-known sequence from Raiders where Indy pursues a truck carrying the Ark.<o:p></o:p> Now watch a sequence from<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Uncharted 2</i> where Drake pursues a truck carrying the dagger/key thing and an ancient Nazi:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YBCWWWPvT4Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YBCWWWPvT4Q&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><o:p><i>All credit goes to the original uploaders for this and the other linked videos.</i> </o:p></span><br />
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</o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;">Eminent film guy David Bordwell makes a persuasive case for <a href="http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/anatomy.php">considering action scenes narratives in their own right</a>, not just flashes of bright light and blood. Tl;dr: action scenes are a story about the protagonist overcoming a series of obstacles, like a film narrative in miniature. So how does <i>Uncharted 2</i>’s storytelling measure up to <i>Raiders</i>?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">It’s not clear who deserves the credit – Spielberg, Lucas, Kasdan, or their 2<sup>nd</sup> unit director – but Indy’s truck chase is packed with clever ideas presented with great economy. A series of quick shots gives us the initial setup – the soldiers in the truck carrying the ark, the three other vehicles escorting them, and Jones in pursuit on a horse. The editing breaks up the action and the camera jumps between the different parties, capturing a number of great touches: the excited gunner who starts firing through his own allies, the man thrown from the back of the truck to crash through a car’s windshield, etc. The best of these starts as Indy struggles with the driver for control, and a falling bystander makes him pause and laugh. It’s a brilliant moment of recognition, when both Indy and the driver crack up…but just for a beat, and then Indy savagely throws the guy out of the cab. It’s a hilarious idea, the timing and execution are perfect, and it even gives us a bit of insight into Jones’s character. As the chase goes on there are many more distinctive gags, details and complications (the wind knocking a Nazi’s cap off his head<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDBd2P_P8D8#t=5m42s"></a>, Indy bending the Mercedes emblem).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">And what happens in <i>Uncharted 2?</i> Well, Drake jumps from truck to truck. He kills some samefaced generic guys who tend to stupidly approach the side of the truck he jumped to. Later, he gets a big gun and shoots a lot of vehicles (although they seemed to be exploding pretty much of their own accord earlier, when he moved across them). It’s the same thing over and over and over. It’s shamelessly repetitive, and there’s no style to it at all. The bad guys in <i>Raiders </i>were also just cannon fodder, but the film gave them personality, as it gave personality to every character and feature of the production. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TW49hp-pI/AAAAAAAAAAc/v1Tw37xRAS8/s1600-h/Indiana+Jones+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TW49hp-pI/AAAAAAAAAAc/v1Tw37xRAS8/s640/Indiana+Jones+1.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>You won't find a scene this good in </i>Uncharted.</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">I’m not blaming Naughty Dog for failing to match a real action movie. A game just can’t do it. How many unique animations would you have to load before you could do something like the <i>Raiders</i> sequence? How much processing power and manpower would it take to make all the people and vehicles involved look distinct? How much work would designers have to do just to include a detail like a hat flying off, because they're madly scrambling to get a level looking even half-decent before E3/demo/corporate presentation/beta deadlines? The limitations aren't just technical; in a committee-driven development culture like the American game industry, developers rarely find the time to get whimsical about resource-intensive details.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;"><i>Raiders</i> isn't the best film ever made, or even the best action film. You can compare plenty of good action sequences from other films to <i>Uncharted 2</i>, and the game will always look like a weak imitation.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">If you blow up one truck in a game it can look spectacular. Blow up three more identical trucks and you start boring me. Maybe <i>Uncharted</i> is aimed at Alzheimer’s patients, and I’m just outside their target demo; if you do not habitually forget things that you <i>just saw</i> you may also have issues with their design philosophy. I stopped counting the number of “cliffhanger” scenes where a character is rescued from a deadly fall when someone grabs their hand at the last second, but it happens somewhere between five and one million times. And it never changes! It’s the <i>Uncharted </i>handshake. (Despite its ludicrous story, even <i>Modern Warfare 2 </i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bWlP3FfKkw#t=1m42s">had the decency to turn this cliche on its head.</a>)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Of course video games are repetitive by necessity, and it’s hard to imagine a game composed of wholly unique moments. But game critics keep insisting I should judge <i>Uncharted 2</i>’s narrative as a film narrative, which makes it one of the dullest movies I’ve ever watched. Films are not inherently better than games, but they will always surpass games that slavishly imitate films. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Anyone who bothers to look closely at a good action film can see the intricate planning, choreography, and stunts that make a great action sequence unique; <i>Uncharted 2 </i>has all the charm of an assembly line.</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Uncharted 2</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"> employs plenty of cinematic techniques, but seems to forget that these techniques actually serve a <i>purpose</i> in movies besides “looking movie-like.” If you told a room of film fans and critics that the following scene was from one of 2009's best films, they would laugh you out of the theater:<object height="340" width="560"><param
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Here's the exposition scene, the valley that follows the peak of the showcase opening sequence. First, the obvious: this could never pass for film. Objects look flat and lack detail. There's very little movement outside of the foreground, and the background is clearly faked. It’s not stylized enough to call animation, but not detailed enough to look “real.” In other words, it’s still a video game cinematic, and looking at it too closely makes me feel like I’m kicking a guy while he’s down. </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Extras are conspicuously absent. Is Drake just lifting those bottles from an unattended bar? Shouldn't there be a bartender, customers, people on the beach? Who decided to replace all of the character's eyes with the <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1078-Uncharted-2-Among-Thieves">eyes of insects</a>?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Technical deficiencies aside, this dialogue-heavy scene should play to <i>Uncharted 2</i>'s supposed strengths. After all, as Plunkett wrote, "there is not a single video game in history that has such professional voice acting, such chemistry between its stars and such confident, capable senses of both drama and humour running throughout." Yet none of the actors make much of an impression in this important introductory scene (other than "don't I already know these people in <i>Dragon Age:Origins</i>?") They're all professionals doing perfectly serviceable readings, but it doesn't seem like they're really <i>there</i> inhabiting the character the way a good actor does. As a rule they're highly animated, excitable, they gesticulate like a motherfucker, they overwork their eyebrows. The actors and/or their mo-cap directors were so focused on coaxing an appropriate level of expressiveness out of their dead-eyed marionettes, they wound up emoting all over the place.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">The pervasive exaggeration here throws the whole scene out of whack. Actors need to <i>react</i> to each other to create a good scene, and they need to have some genuine source of tension or conflict to work with. Many gamers apparently found that in <i>Uncharted 2</i>, but I don't see it. The camera circles around the table restlessly, but it's not working to punctuate the dialogue in the way that a good director and editor make it work. (For a recent example, check out the camera movements during the sit-down at the start of Tarantino's <i>Inglourious Basterds</i>, after Landa's interrogation of LaPadite begins.) And why wouldn't Drake jump at the chance to go off on some dangerous adventure, instead of shooting off lame excuses? Does he really have much going on, hanging out alone on an empty beach and pounding back drinks he gets from an invisible bartender? The scene doesn't establish characters with needs and problems and quirks; it's a barrage of chummy dialogue, a phony disagreement, and one on-the-nose signal of a past relationship.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;">My real problem with this expository scene is what it doesn't say about its characters. Again, <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> is a handy point of comparison. <i>Raiders</i> introduces its protagonist in a spectacular action sequence, then follows his escape with an expository scene in a calmer setting; <i>Uncharted 2 </i>follows the same pattern. However, we're re-introduced to Jones as he teaches an undergraduate archaeology course. This seems hilariously implausible, given the action that precedes it, but it also gives us insights about Jones's character, many of which contradict our earlier assumptions. He has a life outside of raiding tombs. He insists (unconvincingly) that "folklore" is as dangerous as the life-and-limb threats of his pulp-serial archaeology. When one of his students makes a (weird) pass at him, he has no idea how to react. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TbIqamjFI/AAAAAAAAAAk/_daLsQPgjds/s1600-h/Indiana+Jones+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TbIqamjFI/AAAAAAAAAAk/_daLsQPgjds/s640/Indiana+Jones+2.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TbOvYhiHI/AAAAAAAAAAs/HUuiWpD9ynk/s1600-h/Indiana+Jones+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TbOvYhiHI/AAAAAAAAAAs/HUuiWpD9ynk/s640/Indiana+Jones+3.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;"><i>"What would Nathan Drake do?"</i></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">After class, Dr. Jones's conversation with a colleague again plays on the disconnect between the classroom and his work in the field ("I'm sure everything you do for the museum conforms to the international treaty for the protection of antiquities"). When he hears that military officials want to see him, his first thought is that he's in trouble with the authorities, hinting at his independent character. When he hears the news about the Ark, he immediately turns to his colleague in excitement, but remains openly hostile to the visiting morons from the government. When they ask what he's so excited about, Jones becomes extremely condescending, talking down to them like children ("Either of you guys ever go to Sunday School?") rather than the college students he was just lecturing. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TiF22QAuI/AAAAAAAAAA0/7KfA6epB8rg/s1600-h/Indiana+Jones+6.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="272" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NRoPv_lmVjo/S2TiF22QAuI/AAAAAAAAAA0/7KfA6epB8rg/s640/Indiana+Jones+6.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><i>Exposition with a sneer</i></span></div><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;"><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">So you really learn a lot about Jones over the course of this sequence. He gets flustered when his students come on to him! He can be condescending and sort of mean (also note sadistic grinning in truck chase above). He sometimes has trouble spelling words on the chalkboard. All of these moments help us get to know him, and the character seems more like a real human being as a consequence. Even if not all of a character's personality traits are pleasant, they make us more attached to the character.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">The elegant exposition sequence <i>Raiders</i> accomplishes much more, in my eyes, than the corresponding sequence in <i>Uncharted 2. </i>The plot of the game thickens afterward, but its characters never surprised me or took on an unexpected dimension. (Plenty of other games, like the recent <i>Dragon Age: Origins </i>and <i>Mass Effect 2</i>, are much more accomplished in their characterizations and script, although their cutscenes themselves are less polished than Naughty Dog's.) I guess Nate Drake does spend a lot of time commenting on women's asses as they go up ladders, and he is often willing to climb things that other people people don't want to climb first? That's about all I can remember about Drake, who was otherwise a typical wisecracking jackass. Harry Flynn's suicide, in particular, struck me as a total plot contrivance to give urgency to the last section of the game. All we knew about Flynn was that he was a bit stupid, liked Chloe, and was willing to sell out old friends for money. So instead of trying to weasel his way out and survive, he blows himself up just to spite the protagonists? </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia;">Finally, nearly every game critic has celebrated <i>Uncharted 2</i>'s script, and the writing is by no means bad. If you recently sat through cinematics that demonstrably hate all forms of thought (in <i>Bayonetta</i>, for instance), it's a relief when a game's writing doesn't constantly insult you. That said, there are still some scenes like this:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;"><object height="340" width="560"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fRTyh_oCB4M&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=50"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fRTyh_oCB4M&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=50" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;">You may have watched this scene before if you have ever seen <i>The Most Generic Film of All Time</i>. Lazarevic is not a character; he's such a lame stereotype that there's nothing you can say about him that is not also a stereotype. Why does Drake bother taking some poor bastard hostage, when he's already seen enough of war criminal Lazarevic to know that the bad guy doesn't give a shit about anyone? I guess the cinematic director wanted to include <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness">a super cool scene</a> where Lazarevic shoots one of his own troops, motivation be damned. He was only sticking to the <i>Uncharted</i> Golden Rule: Do in your cinematics what you have seen in others' films, dozens of times. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;">In short, <i>Uncharted 2</i> makes for a terrible movie and a decent game. I have no idea why it has been held up as a near-perfect accomplishment or some kind of ambassador to the mainstream. Its achievements are purely technical, and they never reach "film quality." Its compulsion to imitate stifles whatever innovation might have made its way into the game's narrative or design. With varying success, other 2009 releases explored gaming's potential to do what films can't -- <i>Dragon Age</i>'s character approval system, <i>Demon's Souls</i>'s enigmatic and harsh world, <i>Assassin's Creed 2<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">'s crazy <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">historical <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">star-fucking plot, </span>Modern Warfare 2<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">'s "shoot civilians" outrage-bomb mission.</span></i> <i>Uncharted 2 </i>wants nothing more than to be a movie, and that's a little sad. </span></i></span></i></span><br />
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</span></div><i>For purposes of comparison I linked to a number of youtube clips, and all credit for those goes to their original uploaders. Of course, I played through all of </i>Uncharted 2. <i>Email me at post.hype@gmail.com</i>Chris Breaulthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00146674404189934325noreply@blogger.com4