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A Story about Stories

February 8, 2013August 26, 2022 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

Over a year ago there was a small explosion of outrage in the twittersphere regarding a piece in Edge magazine claiming that games can’t tell stories. It’s old, you’ve probably seen it before but then again the same is true of most of my inspiration for these articles. I was exercised enough about it at the time to want to write about it but I had no suitable mouthpiece. Now that I have, it would seem remiss if I failed to get my thoughts down while still vaguely relevant.

At the time most of the commentary regarding the article focused on the fact that it was clearly nonsense. Philosopher and designer Chris Bateman made a point of collecting gaming anecdotes from people in order to refute it. I mean, seriously, who hasn’t been awed, shocked or enthused at one time or another by the plot of a game? Whether it’s the huge twist in Knights of the Old Republic or the big reveal in Halo we’ve all encountered points in a game with enough intensity to wedge themselves permanently into our memories. So what’s an experienced and respected games journalist doing posting such twaddle?

Well personally I’m not so sure it is twaddle. I think the article contains an important point, albeit one that was perhaps not made very well. And that point is only tangentially related to story, and has everything to do with expectation.

When you put someone into a realistic, interactive environment, as most modern games do, their first assumptions are going to be that they’re in a realistic, interactive environment. They’ll explore, push boundaries, find out where the inevitable rules and limits are. But they’ll also expect that environment to push back at them, likely fairly aggressively. After all it would hardly be much of an interactive environment otherwise.

But at the same time gamers have become used to consuming games like they do cinema. They expect a plot, and characters, to engage them. Not just that but they also expect their avatar in the virtual world to be a key player in that plot. They want to feel important and powerful. Wouldn’t be much fun playing the cashier cowering behind the till when the petrol station gets robbed, would it?

This creates an instant contradiction. The gamer expects both to be able to ride a plot without foreknowledge of its twists and turns for the excitement and thrills it provides, while simultaneously being in charge of the game environment. You can’t have both. At its essence this can be expressed by the simple issue of the player killing NPCs who have pivotal roles to play in the plot. Games employ a variety of tricks to stop you ever doing this because doing so would expose the fundamental impossibility of having both a genuine story and a completely open world.

It’s this disconnect that’s at the root of the perception that games can’t have a proper story. Not so long ago games were not particularly realistic, and they were not particularly open. Back then we were happy to consume the plot in a relatively passive way by riding the rails that the game placed us on. Technology has moved on, and so has game design. And we’ve arrived at a situation where the clash between plot and play is being exposed more frequently and more cruelly.

Currently, and quite correctly, when this conflict arises the game play is generally allowed to win over the plot. What’s less obvious is that there are other elements to what people think of as “story” besides the pre-scripted twists and turns along which the game will run. Atmosphere is one example. A game that makes good use of graphics, sound and setting to make the player feel squarely part of the virtual world that it creates can get away with a certain amount of plot railroading because it compensates for that break in realism in other ways.

Another is the emergent narrative that arises from the actions the player takes inside the mechanics and plot that the game provides. Everyone playing Gears of War will get the same plot, but the places and manner in which you kill your foes or triumph over the set-piece battles in the game will be different.

It’s a key element to consider because this is where the clashes between action and plot arise, and where a game becomes personal to the player. Designers have little foreknowledge of how people will interpret their games. Each long, languorous slow dance between a game and its player will be different, unique. And the best games only rarely manage to reach the audience that they deserve.

This emergent narrative points to one possible solution to the conflict, showcased best by the Mount and Blade games. In these titles there is no predefined plot but every effort is made to ensure the player can easily create their own instead. There is a flavourful world to explore, peopled with realistic and well-differentiated characters, and a slew of quests to complete alongside a meta-game which can lead toward various conclusions that most gamers would recognise as “success” of one kind or another.

But the problem with Mount and Blade is that it can take a long play time before even the most imaginative player appreciates and understands the game and its world sufficiently well to start building their own railroad. It’s simply nowhere near as engaging as a title that gives you a character, a motivation and a story and drops you into exciting action from the get go.

Adding plot to an open world setting, the solution explored by the Elder Scrolls games amongst others, tends to result in the worst of all worlds, as I’ve explored previously. That way the player tends to get sidetracked from the plot, while finding that it still has to conflict with their freedom of action. Long term this is probably the solution we should be seeking to explore. But the technology isn’t there yet. Frontier Developments tried with current generation consoles with a title called The Outsider, which attempted to defy linear storytelling in just the manner we’ve been exploring. But six years later the game is sidelined in development hell, because the hardware isn’t there yet.

That’s unfortunate. Not only because of the wonderful new directions that non-linear storytelling could take games in, but because I’ve started to suspect that its absence has become a real stumbling block over the progress of the medium. Lately we’ve discussed the issue of the clumsy manner in which violence is handled in most games. Could that be partly because the sort of subtle, nuanced plotting required to portray such serious issues sensitively requires exactly the kind of linear plots modern gaming eschews in favour of open-world design? Seems possible. It may well we need the means to overcome the fundamental contradiction between plot and play before gaming can truly grow into the mature form it deserves to be.

Dishonored Disowned

November 9, 2012August 20, 2022 Michael Barnes 16 Comments

This morning I traded my copy of Dishonored in for credit toward a couple of Wii U games. The GameStop clerk asked me what I thought about it and I told him bluntly “It’s awesome for about the first third, and then it just runs out of whale oil.” That opinion might surprise NHS readers who recall my first impressions article that I wrote a month ago, in which I was really impressed by the first couple of hours. I stand by what I wrote then, and Dishonored does pass my one hour test. It is a good game, definitely not crap. However, I came to realize seven missions in that it wasn’t a good game worth playing.

There’s a lot to like about Dishonored. The art style is awesome. The retro, Thief-inspired gameplay that values exploration and experimentation over carnival ride-like linearity and reduction of player choice can be lots of fun. The setting is original and the sci-fi is compelling. But there are some rather tragic design-level issues that ultimately undermined all of the good things in the game and resulted in the game sitting in my to-trade pile.

First and most significantly, the development curve of the game is completely screwed up. This is a root cause of most of my other grievances with the game. But at a fundamental level, this is a game where you are so advantaged and over-equipped halfway through the game. The poor AI, which fluctuates between Superman-level heightened senses and the awareness of your 90 year old great grandpa, just can’t keep up once you level up your gear and talents. The problem is that it never feels empowering or cool, like it does in the Arkham games. It just feels like the game is too easy (and I was playing on hard). It turns out that there isn’t really much to develop or explore in terms of ability or equipment development.

Adjunct to this complaint, I found all of the abilities, equipment, and bone charm perks to be staggeringly dull. I didn’t really care about any of them. Yeah, it sounded awesome in the early previews, all this talk about possessing rats. But in practice…it’s really kind of lame. I possess a rat, run through a hole, and come out somewhere that I have three other ways to get to, none of which are any more challenging or interesting. Initially I was playing a no-kill, all stealth game. That completely ruled out about two-thirds of the available weapons and skills. Why do I care about upgrading my pistol or burning bodies to ash when I’m trying to just make ‘em go to sleep? Better yet, why would I bother plunking a guard with three crossbow bolts when one sleep dart will put them down for the one, two, three?

I never even really paid any attention to the bone charms and their minute benefits, and four missions in I realized that I also didn’t care about collecting the runes. I didn’t see where it was really improving my abilities all that much. But more damning, I didn’t see where finding them and using them was making the game any more fun.

The abilities are also an issue because they made the game feel incredibly game-y. I’m borrowing a board game term here. That means that artificial, necessitated mechanics disrupt the dramaturgy, setting, and atmosphere of the game. The blink teleport ability was actually more game-y than Batman’s detective vision in Arkham Asylum. Having to cower in a cardboard box and hope that a guard doesn’t see you is awesome stealth gameplay. Being able to blink up to a street lamp and sit there until they go away isn’t, nor is knowing that you can just kill them with a brutal finishing move if it comes to blows. It got to the point where I was just blinking constantly just to avoid everything, particularly the clunky combat. It’s not like the vials that refill your mana are hard to come by.

So I found that I didn’t really care about Corvo’s abilities or tools, and it even got to the point where I was really kind of actively ignoring almost everything on the selection dial other than blink, the sleep darts, and the occasional dark vision. And those three overused tools reminded me of what I really liked about the opening of the game. At first, you don’t have all of this stuff. You can’t see cones of vision (that’s gamey), you can’t blink past a guard, and you can’t just sleep-snipe everybody in sight. It felt raw, tense, and instinctual. I felt like I was doing something cool, sneaking around. Once I hit the screwed-up development curve and plateaued, it didn’t feel cool anymore. It felt boring.

I knew that my time was at an end with the game when I literally ran through the mission where you have to nab Nikolai Sokolov in his greenhouse. I think I spent fifteen minutes on that one, whereas I had spent an hour or more or some of the earlier scenarios. I just did not care about the bone charms, whatever the hell that heart was saying, or figuring out ways to be sneaky around the Tall Boys (who are not PBR cans, as you might surmise). The mission after had me going back to Dunwall tower, and to get to it there was a part where you have to blink your way up through this waterlock in a terrible, terrible bit of platforming. I turned the game off and said “that’s it”.

I don’t regret playing it, and I had fun with it for quite a few hours. There are some really cool scenes, like a poisoning early in the game and a great scene at a party for Dunwall’s elite where you have to sort out who your target is with three ladies. That one in particular had one of the coolest, most ambiguous outcomes I’ve ever seen. A guy asks you to bring the target down to the basement because she’s the love of his life. You have to knock her out to do so. Once you’re down there, he loads her on a boat and says “thank you, I know that in time I can make her love me”. He rides off on the boat, and there’s this really chilling realization. You basically just aided a crazy man in an abduction. That was pretty twisted, and it demonstrates the quality that this game is capable of in its best moments.

But most of the writing is dull, predictable, and not particularly inspired, despite allusions that your actions will result in certain consequences or a change in the game’s tone. The only detectable tone two-thirds of way through is one of depleted energy, dullness, and a sense that the game’s given you all that it’s capable of and you’re in overtime. In the end, Dishonored is a disappointment. It’s definitely a good game and I think the development team definitely had their heart in the right place. Dishonored 2 might be one to watch, but for right now the stealth game to play remains Mark of the Ninja.

Getting Steamy – Part 1

August 3, 2012June 20, 2022 Matt Thrower 23 Comments

So I’ve now entered the hot and moist world of Steam and caught a lucky break: just before I upgraded my hardware (with the help of NHS user Hobbes), the Steam sale was on and I got to grab myself some bargains. I then went on holiday and had to wait another week to play them. Now I’ve managed some screen time with some of my new purchases, so here’s the lowdown on what I’ve played so far.

First is Binding of Isaac with all DLC. This is a fun action game in the proud tradition of Rogue-like games featuring permadeath, and a randomly generated series of dungeon levels to explore. Unlike most games in the genre, Binding isn’t a turn based tactical affair but a frantic shooter. It’s fun, addictive and has a quirky sense of humour, as you might expect given its premise of being the adventures of a small boy locked in the basement while on the run from his fundamentalist mother who wants to sacrifice him to God. On the flip side without a save function I think it’s a little long for single play throughs – I’m guessing it takes 60-90 minutes to finish a game although I’ve not managed that yet. It also – and I never thought I’d say this of a rouge-like – seems to have too many items. Discovering what they do is half the fun of course, but given the relatively simple game mechanics, the vast array of stuff on offer seems a bit repetitive in terms of effects. Overall, a thumbs up though.

Next is Mount & Blade: Warband. I’ve wanted to play this game ever since I first heard it mentioned here. As an open-world game of medieval fighting and feudalism with acclaimed melee combat, it sounded like a dream come true for me. Unfortunately the first thing I discovered when I tried to play it is that you can’t play it with a laptop trackpad. Since I plan you be going most of my Steam gaming with the PC on my knees, I needed an alternative. So I borrowed a trackball from work, which is serviceable but not great. A gyroscopic mouse that you can wave in the air would probably be ideal but they’re pretty expensive. If anyone has a cheap solution for mouse-alternatives when gaming on a laptop, I’d be glad to hear it. A lesser but more surprising issue is that the game is damn ugly. I know it isn’t recent but, unless my memory is failing me, I’m sure there were games on the original Xbox that looked better than Mount & Blade which is pretty poor showing from a 2010 game. Also, I seem to be a real klutz on a horse, getting my camera in the wrong place all the time and, for some reason, trying to hit the wrong keys when I want to turn. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s the trackball. Yes, definitely the trackball.

I always swore I’d never play Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion because of it’s stupid, stupid monster scaling system where creatures get tougher as your character advances. So eventually you end up being ambushed by groups of bandits with Daedric Armour and magical swords. It seems near-universally unpopular on game forums, so whoever at Bethesda thought that was a good idea was, I hope, not let anywhere near Skyrim. Anyway, the continuing adventures of Olaf that I mentioned in my last piece, had left me with a hankering for some Elder Scrolls style gaming and when I saw Oblivion with all DLC in the sale for £5 it struck me there might be a mod that removes the scaling. Turns out there are several, the best of which have been combined and balanced in the FCOM Mod. so I bought it. Unfortunately for me I didn’t stop to consider how difficult it might be to install: as a software guy I thought I’d find it a piece of cake. But I’d reckoned without broken download links, diverse and contradictory guides and sources of documentation and frequently unstable user-built mod platforms like Wrye Bash. So I’m stuck just on FCOM without any of the graphics updates or combat mods that also interested me. And there’s no way I’m playing it without FCOM at the very least. Ultimately I’ll probably have to scale back my ambition and go with a single anti-scaling mod like Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul and perhaps a texture pack. So it’s likely to be a while before I actually play, if ever.

Finally we come to Legend of Grimrock. I knew this was an old school dungeon crawler but I was expecting it to be based on a generic flavour of 90’s dungeon exploration games as, indeed, it advertises itself as being. I wasn’t expecting a straight rip-off of the classic Dungeon Master, right down to little alcoves to keep items in, walking mushrooms and a rune-combo based spell system. I am, however, very glad they did draw from it so directly because it’s the best of the genre in that era and has been crying out for a modernised update for years. And boy, does Grimrock deliver! Atmospheric, exciting and full of tough combat, nerve-wracking exploration and brain-bending puzzles from the off. It’s been the most played of the games I’ve tried so far, and has wormed its way into my brain to the point where I find that my meals taste of snail slices, my tea feels like healing potions and my dreams are haunted by communications from a mysterious mechanical entity. I’m staying up late to play, ending up tired at work the next day and drifting off into reveries about frantically searching dungeon walls for concealed buttons. One critique is that although the combat is pleasingly tough, even early on (I’m still trying to live down the embarrassment of having my party massacred by a giant snail), it seems over-reliant on backing off or circling to get out of the way of critters while your weapons recover. It gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it’s a minor issue. The skills system also forces you to make early specialisations in weapons and types of magic that you may conceivably live to regret later in the game when you find super-powerful toys you can’t use. But that’s probably my anal-retentiveness kicking in: so far it’s been an absolute blast. I do wonder why the pregenerated party is a bit sub-par though. They always seem to be in games like this. But I’ve started with them, and I’m not going back and doing the first few levels all again, so there. Definitely not if it means facing down more of those spiders than is strictly necessary.

So that’s my first bunch of Steaming. For part 2 of this article I’ve still got Witcher 1 Enhanced Edition, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Dear Esther, Rome: Total War and Crusader Kings II to even try. I’m regretting the last one a little as it wasn’t all that cheap in the sale (even if massively discounted) and I can’t imagine I’ll ever have the time to devote to it properly. In total, I suspect that’s more than enough material to keep me going until next years’ Steam Sale. But I’m using my shiny new laptop to write this document on, and to be honest, I’m starting to wonder why I’m not playing Grimrock instead. Be seeing you after I’ve sent a few more skeletons back to their graves.

It Takes a Simple Man to show the Complexity of Role-Playing

July 20, 2012August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 9 Comments

By happy coincidence, I happen live and work in Bath, which is not only a lovely city but a mere stone’s throw from where most of the UK’s best video gaming magazines get written and published. So, obviously, I keep a pretty close eye on the material they put out. And thus I came to discover in CVG the saga of Olaf, a simple denizen of Skyrim, and his quest to accumulate enough gold to buy a manor house without adventuring, just exploring and doing day-to-day jobs like hunting, mining, chopping wood and picking cabbages.

Olaf’s tale is incredibly compelling. Of course the narrative arc and writing style are good but what makes it particularly absorbing is its innate contrariness. Skyrim is a game environment crafted to allow mighty-thewed warriors and wise mages to become famous through deeds of high and daring adventure, not a cabbage-farming simulator for peasants. That the intent of the game designers can be subverted in such spectacular fashion is perhaps the acid test of genuine “role-playing” in a computer RPG, a genre that’s more commonly synonymous with stat-crunching power builds than actually stepping into the shoes of a fantasy character. Previous experience with Bethesda’s open world RPGs has demonstrated that simply giving players freedom is insufficient: most will still power-game, and most non-adventure related activity quickly becomes boring.

So what makes Olaf different? The answer is that he has very clearly defined rules to his role-play, and an equally clear goal. When you look at what’s going on, it seems so simple as to make you wonder why people hadn’t done it before. And it turns out they had. Olaf was inspired by the Living in Oblivion series, where a journalist tried to live the life of a non-player character in the predecessor to Skyrim. The rules employed weren’t quite as a draconian as Olaf’s, and the goals less clearly defined. but the intent was the same. But having learned this lesson, what struck me is how difficult it is to come up with a set of rules and restrictions that allow you to role-play and still have a fun time doing so.

I had assumed that Living in Oblivion began as a random leap of imagination. But it turns out I was wrong. Its creator, Chris Livingston, got the idea after finishing the main quest in Oblivion but, not yet feeling ready to leave the game world behind, spent time exploring the houses and non-player characters in the game. While doing so he discovered that one particular NPC actually went on holiday: she would periodically visit someone in a different city. During that time her house would stand empty, and she would be found in the dwelling of her distant friend. Inspired by the idea that NPCs could have social lives of their own, he decided to create his own NPC, an ordinary citizen doing ordinary things whilst trying to survive in a dangerous fantasy world.

So it took a particular trigger and a special flash of inspiration to send someone who was both an experienced journalist and an experienced Oblivion player down that path. The lesson is that role-playing imaginatively, outside the usual confines of the game, is hard work. We can’t all suddenly just come up with our own versions of Olaf and Nondrick. The last time I tried something like this in a video game was in the predecessor to Oblivion (seeing a pattern here?), Morrowind. Rather than follow the main quest (which I never finished with any character) I built a mage and set out specifically to immerse myself in the immoral but curiously fascinating world of the House Telvanni, one of the noble families of the game world cast in the long fantasy tradition of secretive, insular, power-hungry wizards. It was great fun for a while, but ultimately it fell flat. There was too much temptation while out and about to go poking my nose into places it didn’t belong and start exploring side-quests, or getting sucked away into the main quest by one of the many points of interface between the House and other areas of the game.

Effectively the problem was that I hadn’t placed sufficient restrictions upon myself. But the more rules you put in place, the harder it is to find a fun combination. I suspect that, unless I’m simply terminally unimaginative, there aren’t many interesting paths through open-world RPGs other than ones similar Olaf’s, or ones that involve sticking fairly closely to the original intent of the game.

But it got me thinking. Ultimately one of the things that makes Olaf absorbing is that in spite of all his rules, he has an awful lot of freedom. Without the need to follow a scripted path, or to indulge in the usual RPG pastimes of stat-building and inventory-accumulating, his story becomes far more compelling and his actions actually more open-ended. Casting my mind back through all the role-playing games I’d ever played, I tried to think of others that had had that same effect, and encouraged me to simply explore and experience rather than pressuring me to build and collect. There were surprisingly few, and none of them were Elder Scrolls games. In fact I could think of only three: Fable, Ultima VII, and a relatively obscure old 8-bit game called Questron.

What those three games had in common was that the story was sufficiently compelling to make me not care about making a power-build. Instead I wanted to rush from quest to quest, to consume the plot, uncover the next twist and turn in the same way that cunningly written thriller novels do. In fact it’s interesting that two of those three games – Fable & Questron – are actually pretty weak as far as gameplay goes. But they still succeeded admirably in capturing my imagination.

As I have observed before, open-world games like the Elder Scrolls series suffer from that lack of focus. What I’m observing here is that they also suffer from trying to please gamers with both a realistic world to explore and a compelling plot to engage with. They’re trying to be all things to all people. This doesn’t make them bad, or not fun, it’s just that ultimately a game that’s spread so thinly across so many different goals is going to have trouble being truly satisfying for most players.

So it made me wonder, how would an Elder Scrolls type game be if it just gave up on an overarching quest and became an open sandbox world for you to play in? There would be quests, of course, and sometimes quests that interlinked into short stories. But without a plot the player would be truly free, truly encouraged to set their own rules and their own goals. They could act like the Nerevarine, Morrowind’s mythical god reborn, or they could be Olaf, or Nondrick or a follower of House Telvanni or anything they wanted, free of the constraints imposed by having had to craft a world in the service of following a particular heroic plot. They’d be free to role-play in the proper sense of the word. The question is, how many players would really be ready for that challenge of making their own value from a game instead of having it imposed from outside. Sadly, I suspect the answer is very few. Are you one of them?

Elder Scrolls Online. Hmm.

June 6, 2012November 19, 2020 Bill Abner 9 Comments

It seems an odd time to develop an mmo and while it is impossible to deny the staggering popularity of The Elder Scrolls games, it is very much an uncertainty whether or not Bethesda can lure the players of the strictly solo RPGs to jump online and share the world with other adventurers.

We always say that it is unwise to overly praise E3 demos, but it is equally unwise to be too critical, particularly with a hands off developer driven demo.

That said.

It looks sort of…bland. The combat, while action oriented and not old school mmo, still has powers and cool downs (despite what the Zenimax rep said during the demo). The idea of public dungeons seems taken right out of Warhammer Online and the public quest system. There are private instances, raids, and pvp with hundreds of people per side.

It is also a low min spec game, which should be laptop friendly and not too graphic intensive but should look sharp on higher end rigs. The demo we saw looked…ok. The vistas look fine but the character animations need work.

There are novel ideas here, such as branching storylines and bonuses for playing as a group such as turning a simple fire spell into an area of effect firebomb just by grouping with teammates.

There still didn’t seem to be too many features here that will entice those with mmo fatigue unless you are just itching to join forces In the world of The Elder Scrolls. I realize I may not be the target audience here, but I have played my share of mmos and I’m not sold yet.