What do gamers want? Part 2

Oops, so much for the posting schedule. Missed April entirely, plus more than half of May. Still, here's part two of this. Hope you like it.

There's nothing like a game which really sucks you into its world. This can be done in many ways. It might be through the quality of the story, or by creating a sense of 'being there', or simply by being so maddeningly addictive that hours pass, unnoticed, until you 'surface' well after midnight.

WANT #2 - IMMERSION

 

2 (a) - Storytelling

Famous example - Planescape: Torment (PC, 1999)

I've previously remarked on the blog that games don't generally go in for complex plots. Some don't bother with them at all. This makes it all the more satisfying when you come across one which bucks the trend.

With Torment, Black Isle chose to place the story at the very centre of the experience - and rightly so, for what a story it was. Your character (referred to as Nameless One for obvious reasons) wakes up on a mortuary slab. He has no memory of how he came to be there, and soon realises he cannot die - if he falls in combat, he simply wakes up back on the slab.

As you speak with other characters, you realise that they remember you from previous lives - of which you have no memory - and you gradually piece your story together. It's both dark and adult in tone, and related mostly by dialogue - almost uniquely for an RPG, combat takes a back seat, and talking to people is more likely to get results than fighting them.

Torment, of course, is set to make a comeback, with its spiritual sequel, Tides of Numenera. We can only hope that as much care will be lavished on the story in the new game as was on its predecessor.

 

The graphics aren't up to much nowadays, but stick with it - it's worth it.

2 (b) - Exploration

Famous example : Morrowind (PC, 2000)

As was mentioned in Part 1, it's very rewarding when a game allows you to deviate from the main story and to play exactly as you see fit. Occasionally, though, a game will not just permit this, but actively reward players who just can't resist poking around in odd corners.

The earliest examples of this were found in platform games, such as the Mario series, where making the effort to get to the most inaccessible parts of a level would often be rewarded. Many RPGs also make it worth the player's while to look everywhere and inspect everything - doing this in a Final Fantasy game (or at least in the older ones where you could wander the world map) was often the only way to discover the game's best items, and even additional characters. Even FPS games have got in on the act from time to time - Doom 2 placed a chainsaw directly behind the player at the very start of the game, as a free gift for those who just have to explore every nook and cranny.

Morrowind's more celebrated sequels, Oblivion and Skyrim, also catered to those afflicted by wanderlust, and raised the graphical bar enormously, but neither could match the sheer scale of their predecessor. As I said in part 1, there was a whole lot of Morrowind in which to get lost, and always something else to discover - a mage who falls out of the sky at the very start of the game, a tomb containing a Viking burial ship, even the corpse of Indiana Jones...

 

Morrowind also featured more unusual geography than its successors.

2 (c) - Meaningful Choices

Famous example - Mass Effect (Xbox 360, 2007)

The concept of a player's decisions making a real difference to the plot of the game is something of a Holy Grail in game design - highly prized, much sought after... and possibly mythical. Obviously it's not possible for designers to write a game with hundreds of different plots to reflect every last parallel possibility, but sometimes it's all too obvious that a game is giving you an illusion of choice, and that the story will pan out exactly the same way no matter what you do.

Many games have got around this by offering multiple endings - the main plot is unaffected, but the choices you make affect the way the story finishes. Some games (notably the Silent Hill series) can end in several different ways, but this device has more commonly resulted in 'good' endings for players who have been upstanding citizens, and 'bad' endings for those whose conduct has been less exemplary. It also means that, if you want to know whether the in-game decisions matter or not, you have to play through the entire game at least twice (or go hunting for spoilers on the Web).

Making a game's story develop differently as you play it is a lot harder to accomplish, but it can be done. Fallout 3, for example, offers the player the early choice of either saving or destroying the settlement of Megaton. Although the effect on the overall story isn't enormous, the player's 'base' from then on can be one of two distinctly different locations, substantially altering the game experience.

I choose Mass Effect here simply because the series attempted something I haven't seen in any other gaming franchise. In the first game, you're offered a stark choice of how to handle an alien threat - and the choice you make then affects events in the later games in the series. A gimmick? Perhaps, but still commendable, purely for trying something different.

A typical cut-scene. The dialogue's pretty good, which is fortunate as this happens a lot.

2 (d) - A sense of 'being there'

Famous example - Deus Ex (PC, 2000)

During the early stages of Deus Ex, whilst prowling the back alleys of New York, you come across a deserted basketball court. There's a ball there too, lying abandoned on the tarmac. You pick it up, naturally - it's clearly there as an invitation. It's at this point you realise that the game's physics engine will allow you to shoot some hoop. I spent at least ten minutes trying to perfect my throw so that it dropped through perfectly, no rim. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

Did this have anything to do with the game? No. Was there a purpose to it? Of course not. It was just put there as a bit of fun, a light-hearted moment in a game whose subject matter tended towards the dark and weighty, but it's one of my best and strongest memories of the game. It made the game world feel more like a real place. It placed you inside your character's head in a way that pure gameplay cannot. That sort of detail can make the difference between a game that is remembered fondly and one that is remembered as a classic of the genre.

When DE: Human Revolution appeared, 11 years later, it also featured a basketball court. Clearly someone at Eidos pays attention to customer feedback.

That's the court right there.

2 (e) - To be part of an epic story

Famous example - Final Fantasy VII (Playstation, 1997)

Game designers may not always do coherent plots, but they do like to have it large, and I could have picked any number of titles to illustrate this. What better example, though, than the first JRPG to crack the Western market?

As I've mentioned previously on the blog, my Damascene moment with this series involved FF VI - but I've gone with VII here. To explain why, I offer the intro sequence. It begins with a tight shot of Aeris walking down an alley. As she steps out, the camera pulls back to show first a busy street, then a whole district, and finally the whole city of Midgar. The game's title appears. Then the camera spirals back down into a different part of the city, ending at a station with a train just pulling in. Out of this jump several people, including Cloud, your main character. It's huge, it's cinematic, and it drops you straight into the story. Damn, now I really want to play it again. It works on the PS3, I just need a spare week or two...

 

(Should the video bug surface again, click here)

Immersion can be accomplished in many ways - sometimes by enormity of scale, and other times by the tiniest of details. The bottom line, though, is that when we play games, one of the things we wish for most is to feel like a part of their world. As a medium, videogames can provide a purer sort of escapism than almost any other form of entertainment. Long may they continue to do so.

What do gamers want? Part 1

Once again, just under the wire to get a post in in March. This one's intended as the first of a series. It's a bit long and probably self-indulgent, but bear with me here.

  

Video games are big business.

Most games released nowadays are developed by large teams of programmers, and require substantial investment of both time and money. It's only natural that the developer wants a good return on that investment, and franchises which can guarantee one are highly prized - hence why we get annual iterations of the likes of FIFA and Call of Duty.

Look at a list of 'all-time greatest games', however (there's plenty of them - here's an example) and these franchises rarely feature. Oddly enough, though, the games which do appear on such lists are remarkably consistent - it's often possible to predict at least five of the top ten, if not the exact order in which they feature. Some games - not all of which were appreciated on first release - left such a lasting impression that they are still revered today, and in many cases have not been bettered many years on.

So, what qualities make an enduring classic? What is it that gamers most want out of the games they play? Over my next few posts, I'm going to try to answer these questions, using as examples some of the titles that do tend to crop up again and again on those all-time lists.

WANT #1... FREEDOM

One of the most common pejorative terms used about games is 'on rails', meaning that the player has little or no influence over the way the game progresses. This may be obvious - an FPS only giving a player one route to take, for example - or more subtle, where an illusion of choice is offered, only for the separate paths to converge shortly thereafter. It's not easy to make a game that offers the player genuine freedom, and not many even attempt it. That freedom, though, is highly prized by gamers - as the following examples illustrate.

1 (a) - Freedom to create your own story 

Famous example : ELITE (multiple platforms, 1984)

ELITE had no plot whatsoever - and therein lay its genius. You began the game in the Lave star system, with a lightly armed Cobra Mk III starship and 100 credits to your name. What happened next was entirely up to you; the game made no attempt to steer you down any particular path. You could stick to well-travelled trade routes between safe systems, trading food and minerals for a small but steady profit, and keeping your nose clean. Alternatively, you could play at being Han Solo, and smuggle illicit cargoes into grubbier ports, risking the attention of both pirates and the police. Or, if you preferred, you could simply jump into a lawless system and wait for someone to attack you, hoping to collect the bounty on their head, and boost your combat ranking that tiny bit further towards the coveted 'Elite' status.

Ahh, the memories.

The game gave you your basic tools, and then left you to write your very own space opera. Nearly thirty years on, the concept has yet to be bettered - hence the flood of interest in 'Elite: Dangerous', a KickStarter project headed by one of the original designers. It has a whole lot to live up to, and there will be a whole lot of disappointed gamers out there if it can't.

1 (b) - Freedom to choose your own playing style 

Famous example : Deus Ex (PC, 2000)

Deus Ex has repeatedly been voted one of the best - if not THE best - PC title of all time. Its secret was the sheer range of possible approaches open to the player to handle a situation. You could tackle your enemies head-on, use the shadows to sneak up on them and taser them from behind, or take them out from a distance using a sniper rifle. Need to get into that building? Pick the lock on the service entrance. Hack into the security system and sneak in via a ventilation duct. Climb onto the roof and enter through a broken skylight. Or just open the front door and shoot everyone. With the right choice of equipment and cybernetic enhancements known as Augmentations, every approach was valid and workable, and you could choose to play in whatever way you found most entertaining.

Other games have adopted a similar approach - Dishonored being the most recent example - but Deus Ex had a balance and elegance which not even its own recent sequel, Human Revolution, could quite match.

Yes, I've used it before. It's still true.

1 (c) - Freedom to choose your own path 

Famous example : The Elder Scrolls III : Skyrim (multiple platforms, 2011)

  

Not everyone wants to be a pioneer. A game which is entirely open-ended may make players feel a bit directionless. A subtle variation on the theme is to give your game a central storyline or quest - but not require the player to follow it. Ideally, the game will have plenty of other things for players to do, and won't lock content away from those who decide not to follow the main path.

Skyrim embodied this approach. The central quest was but one of many in your journal. There were so many 'side' quests that you could argue that they were the game, and the main storyline the sideshow. There were several quest hubs, all entirely unconnected to the story (some, like the Dark Brotherhood, returning from previous games), all of which could be tackled whenever you wished. There was also a plethora of one-off quests, some of which went in interesting and unexpected directions (I recall a haunted house, a murder investigation and a story of alcohol-induced amnesia in the style of The Hangover).

If you didn't feel like a quest, then you could simply wander off into the wilderness to explore, in the knowledge that you were bound to happen upon something interesting. Or you could stay home, in one of several purchasable houses, crafting items or rearranging your bookshelves. You could even get married. Small wonder that many players only tackled the main quest as an afterthought, if they ever got round to it at all.

 

I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to take a holiday here.

Skyrim wasn't the first game to adopt this sort of laissez-faire approach, though it was and is one of the finest. It was preceded by, well, its predecessors, notably 2002's Morrowind, a classic in its own right (Skyrim has better combat, but Morrowind offered a larger area for the player to get lost in). Some might argue that Baldur's Gate and its sequel are even better examples of this type of freedom - but I haven't yet got far enough through the Enhanced Edition on my iPad to be in a position to judge.

1 (d) - Freedom to play in the sandbox 

Famous example : Grand Theft Auto III and sequels (multiple platforms, 2001-4)

 Games are supposed to be fun. You'd think this was self-evident, but sometimes developers can lose sight of it. It's perfectly possible for a game to have excellent graphics, high production values and a well-designed interface, and yet still feel like hard work to play. (I won't name names here - this is highly subjective, and everyone will have their own pet examples).

Inside every gamer (and not too deeply buried either) is a kid who yearns to muck about. Rockstar North, the developers of GTA III (and its even better sequels, Vice City and San Andreas), understood this more than most. They produced varied and detailed city environments (and, in San Andreas' case, countryside ones too) teeming with other cars and innocent bystanders, and invited you into them to create mayhem. In fact, they positively encouraged you to do so, with street races, gleefully amoral 'challenges' where you were required to dispatch large numbers of civilians using, say, Molotov cocktails, stats for 'best stunt jump' achieved, and, famously prostitutes who could be not only 'utilised', but then killed afterwards to retrieve your cash.

Just another perfect day in Liberty City.

Politically correct they certainly weren't (merrily sociopathic would be closer to the mark) but they were imbued with a huge sense of fun which made it easy to forgive their excesses. It's hard not to love games which offer missions that require you to have a car chase in a golf cart, sneak into a rapper's mansion to steal his lyrics, or to intimidate a gangster by driving recklessly with him strapped to the bonnet of your car. (GTA IV, by contrast, although a fine game, fell into the trap of taking itself a bit too seriously, and lost something of what had made the series great).

1 (e) - Freedom to build the world around you 

Famous Example : Minecraft (PC, 2011)

 The term 'God Game' was originally coined to describe Bullfrog's Populous, back in 1989. The term was an apt one - Populous cast you as a deity watching over their chosen people, with the aim of each map being to wipe out another race (yes, it was essentially a genocide simulator). You could raise and lower the land to allow your people to build, and later in the game acquired the ability to call a number of natural disasters down on your opponent.

This approach to gaming proved intoxicating for many people (absolute power, after all, corrupts absolutely). Many games adopted a similar style, such as the SimCity, Dungeon Keeper and Civilization series, all of which were very popular. However, the concept really hit the public consciousness with the runaway success of Minecraft (as a download from a indie studio) a couple of years ago.

Minecraft doesn't make you a God exactly - the world is created for you, and everything takes place from a first person perspective. However, what it does do is give the player absolute control over the environment on a micro-management level. There are two main modes of play. In Survival mode, you must 'mine' the blocks that make up the world, to gather resources which you then 'craft' into tools and other items. The night attracts monsters, so your first tasks are basic ones: build a safe shelter, then weapons and armour to defend yourself. As you become more established, you construct bigger and better dwellings, and mine deep down into the earth in search of rarer and more valuable resources. With practice, you can even build farms and electrical mechanisms.

In Creative mode, there are no monsters and every type of block and device is available to you from the start. It's you and a giant, infinite box of Lego. The only limit, as they say, is your imagination - and however insane and stupendous your idea, someone has probably already topped it. Teams of Minecraft enthusiasts have, for example, built the cities from 'Game of Thrones': (click here if this doesn't appear, there seem to be some issues with iPads)

and scarcely credible feats of engineering, such as this rollercoaster: (again, click here if it's not working as it should)

So, why do gamers value their freedom so much? It may be because few games offer them any. It's complex and difficult to program, and plenty of best-sellers give the player no freedom whatsoever. Or perhaps it's because nobody likes being told what to do. Or maybe all gamers have geeky OCD tendencies and just like being able to customise their gaming environment (I'll hold my hand up to this one. I remember spending ages organising all my portable items into one room while playing Fairlight on my Spectrum in 1985). Whatever the reason is, though, it's clear that while gamers may get along without free will, they're much happier when they have it.

Let's Twist Again

WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS, BUT ONLY FOR TITLES RELEASED MORE THAN FIVE YEARS AGO. IF THAT'S STILL GOING TO BOTHER YOU, PROBABLY BEST TO STOP NOW.

I was looking for something to play last week, and in a fit of nostalgia, I fired up the original Bioshock on my PC. Now, Bioshock will need little introduction for most gamers, but if it passed you by in 2007, it's a first-person shooter set in a gloriously imagined 1950s Art Deco city. Which just happens to be located at the bottom of the ocean. Because, well, why the hell not? This is a videogame, after all, not a Brian Cox documentary.

The game looks a little dated compared to more recent offerings (it is, after all, nearly 6 years old, positively venerable in an industry barely into its 30s) but I wasn't after eye candy. I was looking for something else, something that had eluded me on my first (inevitably incomplete) playthrough back when the game was new. I was on the trail of the fabled plot twist.

Commando. You already know the script.

Videogames are not renowned for having complex stories. Quite the reverse, in fact. Back in the 8-bit era, if a game had a plot at all, it was usually a few sentences on the cassette sleeve. These had clearly been written as an afterthought, in an attempt to explain why the main character happened to find themselves doing what they spent the game doing (assembling spacecraft, escaping from surreal mine workings, singlehandedly dispatching several thousand armed soldiers). Games were generally simple and straightforward to pick up and play, and the story was more or less irrelevant.

Today's games, by contrast, are powered by technology which enables them to tell a story in a way more immediate than a novel, and more intimate than a film. What's more, neither a book nor a film can both place you in a story, and allow you to affect the outcome - or at least to believe that you can. Anyone who played Half-Life will remember the moment they realised that the intro sequence wasn't a cut-scene, and that they could look and move around freely while the story happened around them.

The irony, of course, is that, despite having the tools available to tell stupendous stories, most games don't. To be fair, it's a difficult line to tread - the more complex your game's plot, the less free will the player will have. You cannot serve both the narrative and the sandbox. There are, however, notable exceptions. Planescape:Torment (a truly classic RPG from 1999) contained 800,000 words of dialogue and was driven largely by story, rather than the more traditional combat.

The most memorable gaming stories of all, however, are the ones which turn the tables on you part way through. Plot twists have been around for as long as stories themselves, but when you've been playing a game for 10-15 hours or more and then you encounter something literally game-changing, that's a special moment.

Bioshock's big reveal (which, naturally, takes place just after the point at which I previously stopped playing) is that (a) the game's main adversary is actually your dad, (b) that the bloke who has been helping you all game doesn't really exist, (c) that the man impersonating him has been leading you around by the nose using post-hypnotic suggestion, and (d) that you in fact caused the plane crash that brought you to the underwater city in the first place. While this is all sinking in, your father uses the hypnotic trigger to make you kill him with a golf club. Not many people saw all that coming.

Good though this is, there are even better ones. The most famous example is probably in Bioware's excellent Star Wars RPG, Knights of the Old Republic. The lore you uncover during your progress through the game tells of two Jedi Knights who disobeyed the orders of the Jedi Council and fell to the Dark Side. One of these (Darth Malak) is the game's villain. Late in the game, you discover that his former master (Darth Revan) is none other than your own character, brainwashed by the Council to neutralise the threat he/she posed. It's cleverly done - Revan always appears wearing a helmet in historical cut-scenes, but an audience familiar with Vader and Boba Fett takes this in their stride. Right up until the scene where it comes off.

 My personal favourite takes place in Deus Ex, frequently voted one of the greatest PC games of all time. Your character, JC Denton, is persuaded to betray his employers, the anti-terrorist organisation UNATCO, by his brother Paul, who claims they are corrupt. You are then taken prisoner and wake up in an underground cell, a prisoner of Majestic 12, a clandestine organisation within the government. When you escape this facility, you emerge from a previously locked door and find yourself back in UNATCO HQ. The scales abruptly fall from your eyes, and you realise how badly you've been played. Your bosses are in this up to their necks, and a location that was once your safe haven is suddenly anything but. It's as elegant a turning of the tables as I've ever seen in a game.

...and my work here will be done.

The award for sheer shock value, however, must go to Final Fantasy VII - whose developers wrote themselves into gaming folklore by having their villain kill off the main female character half way through the game. That's 'kill' as in 'irreversible death' - her abilities are lost to the party for good. I remember refusing to believe that this would happen in an RPG, and fully expecting her to be restored to life by the end of the disc. It doesn't happen, and somehow that is even more shocking than her death.

The only problem with twists is that, in order for them to work, the game has to have a strong story which draws you in to the point that you genuinely care about the characters. There aren't many games on that list, and most of them are rightly regarded as classics.

I promised I wouldn't post any spoilers for anything less than five years old, and I won't. However, I'll sign off by saying two final things. Firstly, anyone who hasn't played through the original Portal is missing not only some superb storytelling, but a small slice of gaming perfection. And lastly, in the middle of Batman: Arkham Asylum, your Xbox is not on the blink. Leave it running. You won't be disappointed.