That Starting Area

by Alex Singleton on 2.02.10

I don’t know if I’m alone here, and if I am, please feel free to let me know, but more often than not I find that the most enjoyable parts of a game are right at the beginning. When you have nothing to your name but some crap weapon, limited skills and the world against you. I much more enjoy that dynamic to the uber powered super warrior you inevitably become, or rather have to become to actually finish most games.

I recently watched a Rev Rant about how one of the most enjoyable moments in Arkham Asylum was right at the beginning when it was your wits and one batterang that had to get you through an armed mob of henchmen. By the end of that game, you have super pimp armour, an infared bluetooth bat face-melter and a nuke strapped to your dick, and it’s just not as much fun. Yes, there are now many more ways you take on a room full of douchbags, and in some ways it is great to have options, but now I’m not required to think… at all. Where I originally had to use my brain, to actually pause for a second to think about how I was going to move forward, I’m now spoilt for choice. I suppose that means that I now have the option to select how difficult I want to make things; do I knock everyone out in one efficient simple swoop, or should I try to startle each one and get a silent takedown whilst they’re actually looking right at me? But with that said, even if I choose the difficult option and fail, that just means that I’m a dick, Batman wouldn’t have been a dick, he would have taken the effective and easy option. That then in effect means that I’ve gone and broken the fourth wall by turning this whole affair into some sort of mini meta game. Now I’m an even bigger dick.

What I mean to say is, why don’t we use the puzzle game formula in our action games? What if we never got an upgrade? What if instead of getting a bigger sword, we had to think of new ways to use our shitty dagger? To use our surroundings? To use our brains?

Take Portal for instance. You don’t get a fucking uzi half way through that game. You just have to think of new ways to use the tools you already have.

Another example could be Oblivion. Say for instance you wanted to be an archer, in the caves at the beginning you find a crap bow and like 12 arrows. Now, as it is those 12 arrows are more than enough, as soon as you get out of the cave there are arrows made from everything from wood to asphalt at every fucking corner, but imagine if those first 12 arrows had to last you the entire game. If you fire an arrow at a tree or an enemy in Oblivion you can go and retrieve it, which is very cool, but it’s also pointless because they’re so common, but if all you ever had was 12, then you would make sure you could go get it. This immediately changes how you play the game, how you engage enemies and where you travel. If an enemy is on the other side of a ravine, even if it was an easy shot, you would still be less inclined to shoot him because it would mean loosing an arrow. Now you have to stop and think about whether it would be worth loosing an arrow to kill that enemy? How much more difficult would the rest of the game be with only 11 arrows? Is there any way I can back track later and get the arrow back? All of a sudden our hack and slash action RPG has a got a massive tactical element to it. Golly Gosh.

There was also a degree of this in Far Cry 2. A lot of people had a problem with the fact that your guns jammed and broke. I personally didn’t. What I had a problem with was that once you bought a gun once, you could have as many brand new ones as you wanted. The fuck? What kind of fucking shop works that way? No wonder Africa has a balls economy if all you have to do if buy a product once to get unlimited access to it for the rest of your life! Why not have it so when my sniper rifle breaks the gun dude says tough shit, you broke it, buy a new one. Now do I buy the same gun? Buy a different one in the hope that its better? What if the new one is shit? I’ll have wasted my cash and I’ll have no gun. Little changes like this can give a game so much more depth.

What we need is a new genre. I say that because I’m certain that there will be people who hate these ideas I’m preaching. Some people love to finish a game with a rocket launcher and and helmet made out of a dragons ball bag, hell I love doing that in some games. That’s cool. I get that. Keep that. It’s awesome. What I’m saying is, why not have a new way of looking at things? Instead of just saying that this game is an FPS and therefore must be action orientated to the Nth degree, why not call it a tactical FPS? Or an RPFPS? I know it’s a risk mixing things up (Mirrors Edge) and they may not work right away (Mirrors Edge) but it’s these kinds of ideas that really hold promise in my opinion, and I think some major game developers would be surprised at how much most gamers would let a few trials slide so that we get what we want in the end (Mirrors fucking Edge).

Much Love