Storytelling in Alan Wake

I finished Alan Wake sometime last week. It had a few problems, but overall was a very immersive experience with a very well done story. Oddly though, I found that the longest and least interactive sequence in Alan Wake was the most memorable and interesting section for me.

Generally, over the last decade or so most designers have been straying away from the dreaded cut-scene, with the reasoning that games are not movies and need to find their own way of conveying their stories. I wholeheartedly agree with this idea, but one of the most common solutions has a serious problem. Mainly, the Half Life 2 approach of never taking control away from the player, but forcing him into a situation where the only thing he can do is stand and watch the events unfolding in front of him, usually a conversation between some major characters. Naturally, this leads just about everyone to jump around the room like a coked up ferret shooting everyone in the face and throwing all the interactable objects at all the other interactable objects. The reason players do this is simply because they can. There are no repercussions aside from maybe being unable to hear the conversation unfold over your pointless shotgun blasts.

What Alan Wake does is more or less the same approach, but the designers take away just about all the players abilities. In these sequences all Alan can do is walk. He often loses whatever weapons he has on him, so it makes sense that he has none during these parts, and since the enemies only come out at night time, any day sequence is used purely for story advancement. In the section I was referring to earlier, Alan wakes (hurr hurr) up inside a mental clinic after falling from a cliff into a river. Dr. Hartman, a character Alan despises, runs the clinic and spends the entire section trying to convince him that everything that has happened since the opening of the game has not been real and has been one of many “episodes” Alan has suffered since his wife drowned. Alan immediately rejects the idea, but Dr. Hartman keeps pushing him until I as a player almost believed him.

Being forced to slowly walk around a mental clinic listening to a doctor droll on for around ten minutes sounds like a terrible way to utilize a video games interactivity to tell a story. Yet, because I am able to control the main character I typically feel more attached to him or her than in any other form of a story. When I started to doubt Alan’s belief, all kinds of repercussions started to flash through my head about what it would mean for Alan were Dr. Hartman’s words true. Because I had spent the last four hours playing the events the doctor was claiming to be false I felt incredibly more attached to them than if I had simply watched them unfold.

Alan Wake’s uses of semi-interactable sequences are successful because they make the player care. In contrast, by the time I got to any of these sequences in Half Life 2, all I had done is blow stuff up in an awesome propeller boat. I had little interest in the story because so much of the game had been the journey and that was clearly the interesting part. By the time Half Life 2 Episode 2 came out however, I was a lot more invested in the relationship between Gordon and Alyx. By the end of Episode 2 I completely cared about their relationship and the one between Alyx and her dad so I tended to be less of a coked up ferret and more of a patient listener.

The Nostalgia Effect

The other day I was reading the new VGcats comic. It’s a strip I like quite a bit on the rare occasion it’s updated. The most recent comic on the site however left me feeling confused. Essentially, what it says is that FF13 sucks for A, B, and C reasons, while older RPGs like FF7 were excellent for comparatively better reasons. The comic was quite funny, but the authors’ argument sounds completely nostalgia driven. I wonder if Scott Ramsoomair were to play FF7 for the first time today if he would like it anywhere near as much as he did as a child.

He makes arguments such as the music in FF13 is bland and cookie cutter, while songs like “One Winged Angel” were iconic and memorable. I’ll concede that “One Winged Angel” is a pretty awesome song, especially the orchestrated version for Advent Children, but I can’t think of many other songs that were that memorable from FF7. “Aerith’s Theme” is up there, but overall I’d have to say that at around halfway through FF13 I’m enjoying the music as much if not more.

He also complains about FF13’s linearity versus FF7’s (or any older RPG he likes presumably) illusion of freedom. FF13’s lack of an open world has been a huge point of contention among all Final Fantasy fans since its announcement. I personally prefer it, though I suppose I can’t fault others for enjoying a vast open world. That’s fine, but complaining about a lack of an illusion of choice is just silly. I could understand wanting side quests, but he makes it sound like he just wants to think he can do other stuff and not actually do it.

The most obvious example of his argument being a nostalgia driven love affair is when Scott says FF13 removes any semblance of strategy from the fights by only allowing the player to control one character. I actually played through FF7 for the first time fairly recently and naturally did not have my “Eye’s of a Ten Year Old Makes Everything Awesome” goggles on for the experience. The game has held up over the years, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but being able to control three people at the same time hardly made any of the fights strategic. The materia system essentially made every character the same, which made the fights boil down to what they are in almost every RPG, everyone attacks until their health drops below 50% and then switch the weakest character/healer character to healing duty. There were a few fights that required specific strategies, but all but a handful of boss fights could be beaten by using the aforementioned strategy. Most of the trash monsters could be defeated using only the A button while my left hand was free to feed me pizza.

FF13 on the other hand is about as close to a real time combat system as you can get while still remaining turn based. Once it gets complex the player may only be controlling one character, but he is also in charge of managing which classes everyone is in order to heal, debuff, deal damage or attempt a Stagger. This would mean, for instance, that a fight could start with my chain heavy set of classes (called a Paradigm) followed by an immediate switch to his damage dealing Paradigm in order to take full advantage of the Stagger effect his chain Paradigm triggered, then again followed by a quick switch to a more heal/defense oriented Paradigm, but only long enough to get everyone back to around 3/4ths of their health, and then start the process over again on the opponent he was slowly weakening during the healing phase of his strategy , altering as needed for the decrease in enemies. That is just one strategy I came up with last night when I started facing some enemies with a lot of health that I needed to deal with quickly and I didn’t even go into any of the other facets of combat such as the myriad of moves each class change brings or how triggering a turn early can be incredibly advantageous if it saves the Stagger bar from being depleted. I only mentioned the Paradigm changing aspect of the combat, there is still the timing of the ATB gauge, items, techniques, summons, elemental weaknesses and more all requiring thought in real time.

Most of that stuff probably doesn’t make much sense out of context, but my point is FF13’s combat system is objectionably incredibly more complex and strategic than FF7’s could ever hope to be. If the player was in control of all three characters he would be physically unable to keep up with everything needed to be done. As is, he is micromanaging their classes which is essentially controlling their actions. Of course there are easy fights where pressing auto attack six times is sufficient for a victory, but that is the case with all these games. It may be a faulting point, but for all RPGs, not just FF13.

If FF13 and FF7 switched places and somehow magically had their graphics and audio changed accordingly to match their times then I propose Scott’s comic would be about how the newest RPG from Square Enix features dumbed down combat and a largely superfluous open world. That may be an exaggeration, but FF13 isn’t quantifiably better or worse than any previous game in the series and most complaints against it that I have heard seem to confirm this. Take a look back at your favorite RPG from your childhood and see if you can tell me exactly what it is that makes it so much better than their modern day equivalents. I’ve mentioned before how the genre has been in a perpetual state of stagnation since its creation, so I won’t be surprised when all you can come back with is your personal taste about each games individual story.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy JRPGs, I just think everyone is looking back at the gems from the ‘90s with rose-tinted glasses and refuse to acknowledge that the blockbuster RPG’s of today are just as good* and the RPG’s of the past are just as bad.

*Except Star Ocean 4, Tales of Vesperia, and Eternal Sonata (despite its rad combat system).

Spoke to Soon

Well, I finished Bioshock 2 yesterday and I think I have to say I misjudged it. I really enjoyed the last half of the game, the storyline wrapped itself up nicely and all the loose ends I mentioned in my last post were taken care of in a quite convincing manner. Also, the series change of focus from a commentary on Objectivism to being about a commune styled utopian "family" was a very interesting and fresh change for Rapture.

That said, I’m sticking with my opinion that the combat was my issue with the game, but I’m changing my mind about it being solid enough to keep my interest. What I realized is that my problem with the combat, and in retrospect I had the same issue with the first Bioshock, is that the game starts off far too difficult. Enemies do way to much damage, they attack from multiple angles with weapons that obstruct player vision upon impact. Your arsenal is also hardly up to snuff early on in the both games. Yet by the end of the game you are essentially a walking tank. I could hold a room from an assault of twenty guys without breaking a sweat by the three quarter mark. With proper preparation I bet I could do it without using a med pack, though since both money and med packs flow like water by the end. Once I got to this point in both games I had a great time with the combat. The weapons allow for so many options that fighting off hordes of Splicers never gets old and setting up elaborate preparations to defend the Little Sisters became a game by itself.

This makes the second half of the game a blast, but the first a chore. Luckily the game offers a solution for the early difficulty, Vitachambers. Anytime you die in Bioshock 1 or 2 you are immediately revived in a nearby Vitachamber and any progress you’ve made, including damage dealt to your enemies remains unchanged. Therefore no matter how many times you die it doesn’t matter, you could technically run out of ammo with all your weapons and melee a Big Daddy to death over the course of twenty minutes if you were stubborn enough. Naturally, I think this is a pretty lousy solution for poorly paced difficulty. Unless I was being super careful I was using a Vitachamber during at least a quarter of my fights early on. During each major fight I’d be lucky to die and be revived reeking of failure and incompetence only once per boss while the game gently added insult to injury by telling me to keep whittling away at that Big Sister. Then for the last five hours of the game I never once even came close to dying, laughing as I passed by countless unused Vitachambers armed to the teeth with rockets and EVE.

Games often get easier as you progress through them for several reasons. For one, players tend to get better at games the longer they play them, but a larger reason is usually unlocking newer and better powers as the game progresses. Generally you fight tougher enemies to counteract this increase in strength, but games almost never up the difficulty enough. I understand that it must be a difficult line to walk, there’s always at least two variables determining how hard the latter half of a game will be and both of them vary based on each players personal improvement and dedication to finding every powerup. That’s still no excuse for the stark contrast in difficulty Bioshock 2 has from start to finish.

Making a few of the better weapons available earlier, or lowering the health of some of the earlier Splicers would have gone a long way toward making the beginning of the game as enjoyable as the ending. Even being more generous with the med packs early on rather than later when they aren't nearly as needed would have been a huge improvement.

I wrote this post because I changed my mind about Bioshock 2 so I should probably reiterate I still think the game as a whole is enjoyable and by the end I was quite impressed. It’s definitely a worthy sequel, it’s just a shame they didn’t improve upon such an obvious problem from the first game. Or maybe I just totally suck and no one else had this problem. My pride says this isn’t the case and it's usually right.

You're polishing bone!

I recently played through God of War 3 and absolutely loved it. As usual it was totally epic from start to finish. In fact it started off with such a big bang that I’m not sure it ever quite topped it, but the rest is still plenty good. Funny thing though, aside from some minor tweaks to combat, the game hasn’t changed. The move set for Kratos’ main weapons is exactly the same. The puzzles are as clever, yet simple as ever. Even the anger is the same, actually, the anger might be even more over the top. Kratos kills every single person he encounters with the exception of three. The only three he doesn’t kill he has sex with during the also expected sex mini game.

Has this repetition affected my appreciation of the game at all? Hell no, the first sentence of this article says I absolutely loved it. The fact that the main move set hasn’t changed allowed me to play like a pro right from the start. The outrageous story is as awesome as ever and the new HD graphics and set pieces are jaw dropping. God of War 3 really shows you what the PS3 is capable of.

Yet, when I sent GoW3 back to GameFly and received Bioshock 2 in return I was faced with a similar situation, but am having an opposite reaction. Bioshock 2 looks almost identical to the first game, aside from a few combat modifications it controls the same, and so far the story even seems to be unfolding the same way. It’s pretty much a more polished and updated version of the first game. So why is it that God of War 3 feels like a polished and refined version of its predecessors while Bioshock 2 feels stale?

At first I thought it was because the story seemed to be built on a much shakier foundation than the first. I immediately had questions like why do the Vitachambers work with the new player character and what is the reasoning for Lamb and co. staying in Rapture for 10 years after it all went to shit? That isn’t it though; I’m willing to overlook these flaws for a couple of reasons. For one, I’m only a third of the way into the game, really though, most of my plot problems are minor. Another thought was due to some dissonance stemming from playing as a Big Daddy, but feeling as agile and vulnerable as the human I played in the first game. This can’t be the issue either (though it does constantly get on my nerves), I’ve played through countless games with god awful stories full of player/character dissonance and it’s never been an issue as long as the gameplay is interesting and fun enough. I can’t wait to play Bayonetta after I’m finished with Bioshock 2 and I haven’t stopped playing Borderlands since January, neither of which can even really be said to have stories. I mean they are there, but who cares? The developers certainly didn’t.

I guess that must mean I don’t find Bioshock’s gameplay compelling enough to engross me for an entire new game. Thinking back on the first one this makes sense. My favorite parts were not the plasmids and elaborate traps you could set up for Big Daddies. It was the setting and characters. Rapture was so fully realized and the characters were so well written that just being in the game was enough. That allure must have worn off either during the first game or sometime over the last two years though because I’m struggling to finish this one.

Anyway, I think I had some greater point I was trying to make about fun gameplay, but I can’t remember what it was and Slevin just texted me to play some more Borderlands.

You know what, upon further reflection I may have already made this point with my Mass Effect 2 post so just go read that instead.

Jebus out!

Weapon of Choice

Recently while reading Brainy Gamers’ article about Heavy Rain I started thinking about player choice in games. I have heard a lot of people making the critique that games only offer an illusion of choice because the story still has to unfold in a certain way. I even heard it from my roommate while playing Heavy Rain just last week. This is kind of a silly complaint. I want to clarify before I begin that Brainy Gamer doesn’t ever say this in his Heavy Rain post, he just got me thinking about this.

While it is true that games don’t really allow the player to do whatever he wishes, there are few insurmountable problems that cause this. The most obvious problem is that in order to have a narrative game, which is the only type of game where this issue could arise, the player cannot be allowed to do whatever he wants. It’s impossible to tell a story when the main character can just kill any other character whenever he wants. What if in Half Life 2: Episode 2 Alyx actually dies anytime you get curious and shoot her in the face? I’d be willing to bet almost everyone shot at her at least once. The entire story would have to change. What if the story was complex enough that it had a ton of characters, the amount of branches the developers would have to create would quickly become astronomical. That’s just thinking about the freedom to kill anyone at any time, what if you could do other things, all altering the story appropriately? Even if someone managed to get over the technical feat this would require, you would no longer be playing a story, you would be writing your own.

The best example I can think of a narrative game that allows you to do whatever you want is the GTA series. In GTA4 you can go out on dates, drink with friends, surf the net, or drive a stolen taxi down a sidewalk leaving dozens of broken corpses in your wake. You can't do anything you wanted, but there was plenty to do in Liberty City. Still, any mission you embarked on relating to the story could only end one way if you were to proceed. Yes, there were maybe three or four key missions that gave you some superficial choice that had little bearing on the story, but overall there was no real choice because it was necessary for Rockstar to prohibit certain actions in order to tell their story. This resulted in critics coming up with newfangled words like ludonarrative dissonance to describe the disconnect players experienced when Nico would take Kate out on a nice date and discuss his desires to escape a life of crime shortly after murdering thirty people on a busy street because he was bored between missions. This type of freedom has its problems. Besides, it is an entirely separate entity from the narrative, so it doesn't address the critique at all.

On the other hand, games like Mass Effect 2 do an interesting job incorporating player choice. Depending on your actions you can be a total jerk, an agent of justice or more realistically anything in between. Pretty much every other game that has a morality systems is superficial and silly, but the Mass Effect series has some subtlety. Shades of gray does wonders for this kind of system. When you get down to the story however, aside from a few major bulletpoints it plays out the same for everyone. I’d put this into the branching storyline category I was talking about earlier. BioWare went with the much more technically feasible approach of only having a half dozen or so branches all ending with essentially the same thing, still leaving players with only an illusion of choice.

I think a current idea is emergent narrative is the solution to this problem. Hell, I get the impression that emergent narrative is the heralded promised land of storytelling in games, period. It is a neat idea, making the focus of the game how the player accomplishes a task rather than the intermittent story his actions interconnected definitely plays to the unique strength of the medium and I would love to see it flourish in the future. However, the poster child for emergent narrative is Far Cry 2 and it has a very rigid story that it adheres too. Clint Hocking and Ubisoft Montreal made the decision to put emphasis on the player experience and provided the player with lots of tools to have a myriad of them. They all have these experiences while going through the exact same story however so player choice only goes as far as how you want to go about killing the next group of guys.

Another games that has done emergent narrative very well is Left4Dead. The stories you hear fellow gamers tell after playing this game are always about their unique experience rather than one specific part of the game everyone went through. Left4Dead might be the best example of a game succeeding in giving the player freedom of choice. Valve provides the players with a setting and really does allow them to write their own story. It is an interesting compromise between narrative and player choice. The only problem is the story Left4Dead tells is hardly of the type that gamers like us are asking for.

What I’m getting at is if we are going to ask for meaningful and interesting stories in our games, we cannot possibly expect them to give us the freedom to do whatever we want within their world. It cannot work on a fundamental level. Besides, I don’t quite see the problem with our current setup. Sure, video games interactivity is what makes them unique from the other art forms, but interacting can still have a very powerful impact without allowing the player to make any meaningful decisions. Just by virtue of being in control of the main character is enough to add that extra layer of feeling that movies and books cannot. The anxiety and pressure I felt during some of the more intense scenes in Heavy Rain and the adrenaline rush I got from certain parts in God of War 3 were far more powerful than if I just watched them on a screen. Kratos doesn't have to have the option to give Zeus a bouquet of flowers and a bucket of puppies instead of punching his face into oblivion for games to truly reach their full potential!

Celebrate liberty by pre-ordering Splinter Cell Conviction

I just got an email from GameStop with the same subject as this article. I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about it, I just thought it was totally absurd and felt like sharing. Can you think of any better way to celebrate your freedom and liberty than by purchasing a game from a faceless corporation several weeks before it's released?

I'm pretty sure I can... but that silenced SPAS-12 is pretty enticing.

Heavy Rain Addendum

Maybe a half hour after posting my Heavy Rain review I realized I forgot to touch on a key point. A large part of what made the game so intense was that it could unfold in quite a few different ways and once you made a decision or a mistake there was no turning back. This meant that if during one of Ethan’s trials you failed and he died, his story was over and he was obviously no longer able to save his son. I’m not entirely sure if you can die in every dangerous situation, but I know every playable character can die and alter the story accordingly. There is no reloading, the story progresses no matter how well you do, which makes every decision and every rapid button press that much more important.

I found this quite interesting because it made death actually mean something in a video game. Joystiq interviewed the Heavy Rain writer and designer David Cage, and he touches on how killing another person is very different in this game as well. I can’t really go into any detail without spoiling anything, and definitely don’t read the interview if you are worried about that. I just found it amazing how with a few small changes killing and dying in a game becomes much more like real life than it ever will be in something like Halo.