The Pure, Written Word

Assassin's Creed III has a lot of issues.  It is, in fact, so replete with issues that in almost any other case, it would be rendered a cold, inert mass; I'd shove this lump aside, perhaps disdainfully with the toe of my boot, and move on to something less "troubled".

The worst offenders are technical.  While I understand that console players and a large number of PC gamers have had few or no issues with it (excepting the loss of a few incidental frames), inside the bizarre architecture of my machine AC 3 is a hot mess.  It stutters constantly, crashes like a derby car.  It howls in open rebellion at the inadequacy of my aging computer.  It is nearly as likely to fatally malfunction as to work properly.

Sidebar: the effect of this regular implosion has led me down a dark hole of .ini editing, feature disabling, and dust annihilation, hours of which have yielded no appreciable results.  I'm reminded of the bad old days, when the similarities between convincing a PC game to run properly and the practice of black magic were strongest.  My conviction that all of the work I've put in, trying to adapt the mold of machine to best accept the pour of Assassin's Creed III, has borne fruit is purely faith-based and anecdotal.  But even this clockwork, horror-show dimension of my time with the game did not deter me.

A perfect condensation of my experience:  early on, young Ratonhnhaké:ton is inhabiting the body of a hallucinated winged animal, soaring through and above a surreal landscape that is startlingly beautiful and otherworldly.  The liberating sensation of flight and the day-glo magnificence of this alien landscape are so breathtaking, that I completely miss a lot of the critical narrative being delivered via voice-over.  Then, I careen into a tree, failing an optional objective.  Because I'm a masochist completionist, and committed to perfect syncing the entire game, I restart.

This time, I'm so focused on listening to the narrator that I completely lose track of the spectacular moment passing around and through my winged avatar...and then violently hurtle into another bit of errant lumber.  Restart.  More progress this time, trying to keep a laser focus on navigating; another failure.  Restart.  I make it almost to what I assume is the end, and then a sharp change in elevation has me crashing through some dangling tree roots.  Restart.  Success!  I even have some rough sense of what the narrator was expressing, and while I'm boiling with frustration, there is also relief.  As the sequence ends, I gratefully lower my controller and the screen fades to white.

Hard lock.  The game is frozen with my progress unsaved.  That dazzling white screen and the hideous shriek my speakers are emitting are the only mementos of the last thirty minutes of my life.

Why material objects exist in this fugue state is beyond me, but more importantly, stealing the breathtaking impact of this moment by shoehorning in a failstate is almost unforgivable.

But I did forgive you, Assassin's Creed III.  I kept on; there was a tremendous amount of keeping on.  When I began, I debrided my mind of all the criticism I'd heard regarding your lengthy open and found myself thoroughly charmed and delighted.  While I saw systems beginning to mature in the world around me, and felt a fierce keening to plunge recklessly into them, I let you guide me instead.  The subtle story you spun surprised me, the tantalizing power of your secret narrative compelled me forward.  You sloughed off your flaws, even transcended them.  I was wholly committed; I had grown with Ratonhnhaké:ton; I would liberate his people; I would save the world.

And then, that old saw.  By the time the world opened up, and I found it littered with a staggering number of collectibles and diversions, my desire for non-linearity had reached a fever pitch.  I threw myself into them happily, gorged on them.  The crashes got worse.  Days later, I was sated, but nowhere near finished.  Feathers.  Trinkets.  Hunting challenges, hunting missions, frontiersman challenges, frontiersmen missions, naval missions, treasure map missions, homestead missions, assassination missions.  Almanac pages.  Stockpiling, crafting, trading.  The underground.  Masonic puzzles.  Sync points.  Liberation missions.  Fort assaults.  Convoy attacks.

So.  Many.  Things.  Such a shameful feast of THINGS that my appetite for them rebelled.

I lost the thread.  More importantly, I lost the sense of place, and the connection to these people.  They'd been distilled down to icons, icons that represented systems, systems I'd begun to resent.  I got you all of those feathers, Assassin's Creed III:  a fucking outfit?  Really?

Again, I know that the failure is mine.  I could've should have stopped.  Gotten back to what mattered.  I will.  I'm nearly done.  I still love you, Assassin's Creed III, though it is a brutal love that a future version of myself will look back on cringingly.  Perhaps, come Assassin's Creed IV, after Ubisoft and I are both thoroughly exhausted, one of us will have learned.  Will know better.

I wonder, though.

Spoiled

Games are a lot like fruit.   When a game becomes too heavy with content, it drops to the ground, and while there's a grace period of a few days where it might be salvageable, it inevitably begins to rot.

This is an old refrain for me; I have a powerful compulsion when I begin a game to mine it for every last bit of content. This compulsion starts strong, my complex aggressively asserting itself as I scour every inch of a game world for collectibles or upgrades or any other dry piece of flotsam the designers have left drifting around.  As I push further in, that compulsion begins to fade, or transform into boredom, and I begin to question myself.

Why am I doing this?  Why am I grinding through this tedious exercise for rewards that feel increasingly less fulfilling?  While at first I may feel little surges of excitement every time I discover some wayward collectible, eventually it stops being fun and starts feeling more like busywork, like a job I've paid someone else for the pleasure of doing.

This is almost inarguably a failing on my part, rather than the designer's.  Sure, in the vast majority of these cases, I could just ignore all the peripheral distractions and focus on the meat of a game, the main campaign or narrative.  But my OCD rarely allows me that luxury, and perversely it's the games that I enjoy the most that most often drive me into these fits of mindless tedium.

I find that I have to draw arbitrary limits for myself.  As I played through Sleeping Dogs, a game that has for the most part surprised and delighted me, I had to decide to ignore some of the wealth of distractions on offer and focus only on the ones that I'd already invested in, or that would provide meaningful rewards.  Hunt down the health shrines, ignore the lock boxes.  Find the jade statues, ignore the security cameras.

The problem isn't that I dislike collectibles.  Clearly they satisfy some base need in me to scavenge a game world that I'm immersed in for its hidden gems.  The problem, I think, is when those collectibles come in such a staggering volume that finding them all devolves into the modern equivalent of a pixel hunt.  I wonder what narrow percentage of the market such a numbing abundance serves, and how many resources and development hours are committed to providing it.

There are solutions, some of them elegant enough that they don't have the sour taste of compromise.  Games like Spec Ops: The Line manage to assuage that collecting compulsion while preserving some of the joy of discovery.  The key is that finding intel in Spec Ops not only never feels like a chore but adds some meaningful context to the story.

Instead of swelling an experience with so much content it starts to bend the bough, design needs to be about balance.  For their sixty bucks, gamers deserve an end result that's perfectly crisp, ready to be plucked, and not a chore to devour.

Why is it always "video games encourage violence" and never "video games encourage the stacking of blocks"?

Constriction

So I haven't seen any of the NPDs for Alan Wake or Red Dead, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that latter is crushing the former in sales. There's the argument that Red Dead was more heavily marketed and that Rockstar has a much weightier pedigree than Remedy, and that may account for 10 percent or so of the difference, but there's something larger at play that we need to address.

It's about freedom.

It's one of the first things you learn as a DM in a table-top RPG: don't railroad your players. Gamers don't like being pushed along a narrow canyon; that's a gameplay element we tolerated once only because there was no alternative, and in fact the alternative seemed impossible. At the very least, the modern gamer demands some sort of side diversion or alternate path, or a sixty dollar game doesn't work as a realistic value proposition. Witness Final Fantasy XIII. Sure, that game sold a mess of copies, because it's a game that has the words "Final Fantasy" in the title followed immediately by a (as video game sequels go) ludicrously high number. But as immediately as it was released, and even in the pre-release press, there was a ton of criticism about it's linearity. Sure, stalwarts held that 30-50 hours into the game it opened up, but that's a very difficult way to snare casual gamers or gamers who aren't already interested in your franchise. Even "hardcore" gamers or those of us that have always had a fairly vested interest in that series balked at the idea of a JRPG that runs you along a straight path between lenghty cutscenes.

I love the idea of Alan Wake. I love a company, especially Remedy, attempting to sell a video game on atmosphere. And who knows, maybe it's a compelling experience. But I'll never find out, because I'm not going to burn 60 dollars on a game that pulls me down a narrow, one-way path. A decade into the 21st century, I don't feel this is an unreasonable position.

I will mount my horse, ride across the frontier, and occasionally wax a little bit mournful that it's not just a tad bit darker in New Austin.

-a

Bewitched

So after an extensive Borderlands addiction finally started to subside yesterday I began a flirtatious little fling with The Witcher.

Borderlands was an odd experience. I began feeling pretty lukewarm about it, and then lost interest in it completely for a while. But then, needing something fairly mindless to play while I listened to podcasts, I cracked into it again and it got it's hooks very deeply into me. I finished the main quest, downloaded all the interesting DLC (read: the two packs without Moxxi in the title), and burned through those, devouring every scrap of gameplay I could extract from them. Then I started a second playthrough, which is something I almost never do. On top of that, I have two other characters I play exclusively with my friends, both of which are now around level 30. This is a rare enough phenomenon with me that it's almost unique in my video-gaming history.

But finally yesterday I started to crave it less, and leapt on the opportunity to sample The Witcher, a game I've been interested in for some time but never committed to actually installing and playing.

First impressions are good, I like the deep customization, and the combat system is just novel enough to be interesting. I don't know if it'll stick (I picked up a ham sandwich today, alongside several other food items, and when my inventory started to look crowded I experienced a certain nervousness about the game's longevity) but it's amusing, and delightfully German. And I need a little more deutsch in my life.

I love the idea of putting an Intuition button in your game, but doubt I'd enjoy any game that included an Intuition button. What a terrible and completely irrelevant dilemma.

Mass Effect 2 Postmortem

I finished ME 2 a few days ago and have come away from it convinced that Bioware has on it's payroll a coven of dangerous psionics with direct access to my mind.

I've never found loot-lust compelling, I've always been a sucker for narrative, and though I enjoy an epic adventure there's a razor's edge between a satisfying, fully immersive experience and tedium.

Though most modern releases that exceed the 20-30 hour mark give the player some ability to truncate their experience, I have a fairly serious OCD complex that drives me to experience every last bit of available content. The problem with this compulsion is that I almost inevitably become bored with a game well before thoroughly exhausting it. and end up trudging through the last 10-50 hours out of some ill-founded sense of loyalty.

Imagine my delight, then, upon discovering that the techno-priests at Bioware had crafted a game that balances almost perfectly on that edge. Though I lost my appetite for canvassing every square inch of planetary mass that might yield resources well before I'd finished scanning them all, I felt no guilt in bypassing the last few systems. It's the possibility that somewhere in the vast abyss of untapped content might lie something awesome that triggers my OCD. EDI's soothing presence, assuring me that a given planet held nothing anomalous, quelled those demons and let me push the narrative ahead free of the shackles of consumer guilt.

Every time I sat down in front of my PC prepared to play I did so to satisfy a powerful craving, and not out of obligation. I can't say the same for Dragon Age, or Neverwinter Nights 2, or any of the Final Fantasies. I hope this perfect balance metastasises through the rest of that honorable studio and then relentlessly infects every corner of the industry, so that all games eventually become optimally designed to feed directly into the pleasure center of my brain.