Quest to Nowhere

A Missed Opportunity with the Last of Us?

By the time I had finished watching the first trailer for Naughty Dog’s the Last of Us back in December, I was really interested in the game. Not because it was a new Naughty Dog game, but rather because from the way the trailer was put together it seemed you were going to be playing as Ellie, not as Joel. Thinking about what that would mean, not only for how the game’s narrative would be presented, but also how it would affect the game’s gameplay is what got me interested.

Narratively speaking Ellie seemed to be a perfect foil for the player since she is doesn’t seem to know much about the world, let alone the way it was before the apocalypse. While Joel seemed like he would be a great fit as a mentor, not only to Ellie but also to the player. To help you not only get an understanding of the world you are in, but also to teach you the skills you will need to survive.

Gameplay wise Ellie, as a 14 year old girl, obviously isn’t able to physically go toe-to-toe with a zombie (something even Joel seemed to have some trouble with.) Never mind her being able to use firearms, which she might be able to, but probably not super effectively. Which would mean that the game play would be less focused on you, as Ellie, engaging in combat, and more focused on things Ellie would actually be able to do (ie: platforming and puzzle solving.)

This isn’t to say that you still couldn’t have gameplay related to combat, but rather that it would be more of a support role then one of direct confrontation. So whilst Joel is fighting with some zombies or humans in one place, the player as Ellie could sneak or platform around to a place where she would be able to cause some rubble to fall onto an enemy, or do something to destroy an enemy’s cover. Basically things that maybe wouldn’t take out an enemy directly, but would make it easier for Joel to.

Not that you couldn’t give Ellie a rifle and have her snipe at enemies, which could potentially lead to some interesting moment to moment choices as the player. Where the player has to choose to shoot at an enemy, thus using some of the little ammo they have, or spend time maneuvering to a place to cause something that will help Joel fight the enemies.

Now unfortunately recent information about the game has indicated that in fact you will be playing as Joel, with Ellie being controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence. And after reading a bit about how the game is going to play I can understand why they’ve chosen to go with Joel.

From the sounds of it they want to have very physical close quarters combat between the player and the zombies, which is obviously only something Joel can do given the choice between him and Ellie. There also seems to be some sort of mystery to Ellie, since she has hired Joel to smuggler her out of the safe zone which has apparently caused the military to pursue them. And having that sort of major plot thread is pretty difficult to do if you are playing as Ellie since her history plays an important role, and not knowing that as the player can cause some immersion and congruency problems. Since if you are supposed to be her, but then you don’t know something about yourself that you should know.

Now obviously the game is a long way from getting released and we still don’t really know all that much about it, I still can’t help but feel disappointed in what I think is a missed opportunity. In that is was a missed opportunity to really try something new in terms of gameplay, and in terms of the player’s experience in the game. Simply by moving the player from being in the role of the most powerful character, to the role of a supporting where they are essentially playing what is normally the role of the game’s AI. Now I don’t know if what I was thinking would have been a better game, but it at least would have had some new gameplay experiences for the player which I think would have made it a lot more interesting.

Little Mac vs. Goliath: the Dual Themes of Punch Out

Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, the classic NES game, has a rather clear theme to the core narrative that the player experiences. This theme is that of the underdog, the classic sort of David vs. Goliath theme that someone small can defeat someone that is much larger than them. But it also shares another theme with the David and Goliath tale, which is that intelligence trumps physical strength.

Now what is interesting about the underdog theme of Punch Out, is not so much the theme itself, but rather how the entire presentation of the game is based around reiterating it. Nearly every aspect of the game visually is about making the player feel small, and making the player’s opponents feel larger than life.

This is not just due to the size of Little Mac’s sprite compared to the sprite of the other boxers, but also in the amount of space they are able to move in. The visual language along with the game design decisions for Little Mac’s movement are about making the player feel confined, almost claustrophobically so, in order to make them feel smaller and weaker compared to their opponent.

For example as Little Mac you as the player have very little area to move around in, and very few options for what you can do in that area. Your only defensive moves are to either dodge to one side or the other or block. Visually when you dodge you don’t appear to move very much from where you are normally standing, so even when you dodge a punch it seems as if it is just missing you. If you choose to block, Little Mac puts his hands up to cover and protect his head. This gives him the appearance that he is almost cowering from his opponent.

In comparison the opposing boxers that you are fighting as Little Mac are not only much larger than your character, but they also use a lot more of the screen space. They often have moves that cause them to move around the ring a lot or use a lot of the ring space. This makes them not only more visually impressive, but also adds to the player’s feeling that they are much stronger than their boxer. Especially in comparison to what Little Mac can do.

Now the importance of all of these design choices that are there are to make the player feel like the underdog, which puts it in their mind that they are going to lose. This means that when the player does lose that it isn’t as big of a deal and so it doesn’t feel as punishing, but also makes it so that when the player succeeds in defeating a boxer that the elation and feeling of accomplishment is much higher.

Built on the foundation of this theme is the theme that brains beats brawn. In the story of David vs. Goliath it was David’s use of technology, (aka intelligence,) that defeats the giant warrior. In Punch Out the player doesn’t level up Little Macs stats to make him as strong as the other fighters. The player defeats their opponents by recognizing patterns in how their opponents fight, and finding ways to take advantage of that.

And even if the players themselves are not able to figure out the patterns, they are able to acquire that knowledge from others. Which back when the game came out meant either from one’s friends, or from a gaming magazine, but in either case it showed the power that knowledge has, because even getting a small clue about the way in which one of the boxers fought could make a fight with them much easier.

This version of Punch Out is the only version that is visually set up like this. All of the other games have you seeing the other boxer from the perspective of Little Mac. And the other boxers while still bigger than Little Mac, they are not as unnaturally large as they are in comparison to Little Mac in the NES version of the game.

And while the perspective is a visually interesting one, these other versions of the game don’t have as strong an underdog theme, because Little Mac feels more comparable to the other fighters since they look more like him. This in turn makes the successes less memorable and less enjoyable, while also making the defeats much more frustrating.

Bulletstorm’s Scoring System: More Than Just Flashing Numbers

I finally got around to playing Bulletstorm the other day and the thing that struck me about it, which I think probably strikes everyone about it, is the scoring system attached to the “skillshots” you can perform whilst you dispose of the game’s enemies rather indiscriminately. It’s an interesting system that actually seemed to add a good bit of fun to the game, and so I started to wonder about what Bulletstorm would have been like without it.

Initially you may look at the system at face value, that it’s sort of gamifying the game by adding this additional meta layer to it. That it’s playing to the psychology of video game players, and how they respond positively to numbers going up and flashy indications that they are doing things well. Basically that it is doing what social games do to seem engaging and enjoyable for some players, and adapting that a first person shooter to cover up problems in the gameplay.

However you do start off playing the beginning of Bulletstorm without the whole scoring system in place, and from that I think we can discern that it’s likely that the game would still be a fun shooter. It has good mechanics, interesting environments and set pieces, and would probably be a pretty fun and good game even without the system. Which then brings up the questions of what exactly is the whole scoring system there for? What are they trying to get the player to do with this system?

The answer I’ve managed to come up with is that this system is in place not necessarily to reward a player for being good at the game, but rather is there to get the player to think more creatively. By which I mean that because of the system the player is not to just skillfully kill all their enemies by shooting them in the head, but rather encouraged to look at the environment they are fighting and the arsenal of equipment at their disposal, by coming up with interesting and fun ways to use them.

I’ve noticed this in how I approach the gun fights in the game, where I’ll be constantly looking around the environment to pull at enemies, or kick them into. This sometimes causes me to play the game more efficiently, but often causes me to waste my time trying to do something that doesn’t end up working. But I’m not particularly bothered when it doesn’t work, because I am encouraged to try and fail. This is because there is no real punishment for trying to do something and not succeeding, aside from the battle taking a bit longer then it perhaps should have taken.

Additionally there is a great amount of satisfaction when you come up with a silly/interesting use for the weapons, and then manages to not only pull off the actions required, but discover that it was actually one of the “skillshots.” There are few things more satisfying in the game then when the “skillshot” name pops up, and there is a, “new,” tag on it.

Because of this system Bulletstorm has managed to make trial and error gameplay fun, and encouraged players to play through this game in a way that they probably wouldn’t have. This was further supported by the tone of the game, that was in line with the silly/fun arcade style of gameplay, which is reflected in how the characters act, (but that’s probably a whole other post.)

When Small Changes Add Up to Big Problems: What Happened to Uncharted 3’s Combat?

On the most recent episode of the Enter Your Initials podcast I talked about how Uncharted 3’s combat was broken and bad. After finishing the game and thinking about it some I wasn’t entirely sure if the combat was actually broken and bad, or just that the combat mechanics were the same as Uncharted 2 and just hadn’t aged well over the past two year.

So this weekend I decided to revisit Uncharted 2, which I played about a third of the way through, and I can say that the combat in Uncharted 2 is still really good. There are some problems, but they are relatively minor. Basically what this reinforced for me is that something happened between Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3 that led to the combat just not being as fun as it was in Uncharted 2, never mind being as good.

I’ve tried to figure out what changes were made by comparing the differences between the two games, and from what I can tell it’s mostly a lot of small changes that were done to make things better, but collectively ended up breaking the combat of Uncharted 3.

What Changed (that has been confirmed):

First let’s start off with the two things Naughty Dog has confirmed have changed, gun accuracy. In a post on the Naughty Dog blog Justin Richmond, the Game Director, discussed what changes had been made:

“In Uncharted 2 the bullets would leave the barrel at a pre-set deviation when you were aimed in. What this means is that the bullets would not fire straight out of the barrel all the time — they could come out at an angle. Therefore, you could have a target clearly in the reticle and still miss it by a wide margin. This was frustrating, because it was difficult to tell why you were missing a target.

As a result, we wanted to be sure you had a better grasp of whether you were hitting or missing a target. In Uncharted 3 the bullets now fire straight out of the barrel 100% of the time.”

While they did this to make it easier to tell when you were missing your target, it actually makes it easier to miss the target. The problem is that the controller is an imprecise control system, if you were playing this game with a mouse it would make sense for the accuracy to be that precise since it’s much easier for the player to point the reticle at exactly what they want to shoot, but with an analog stick it is harder to get that sort of precision.

But this isn’t a knock for it using a controller instead of a mouse, but rather that while having that bullet spray may have made it hard to tell when you were missing your target, it also made it so that you didn’t have to be perfectly precise with your shots. All you had to do was make sure the target was within the spray range of you gun, so while a shot two inches to the right of the enemy would miss in Uncharted 3 since the bullet would go exactly there, in Uncharted 2 you were likely still going to hit the enemy.

Additionally due to the nature of the game, it seems out of place to demand precision aiming from the player. What I mean is that you would expect that demand in a realistic shooter, so in an unrealistic action adventure world like Uncharted’s it feels as though it doesn’t fit with the setting and style of the game.

What Changed (from what I can tell):

The next thing I’ve noticed that changed between the two games are the enemies, specifically how they behave. In Uncharted 3 the enemies are pretty aggressive, by which I mean they generally don’t seem content to stay behind a piece of cover and shoot at you. They seem to always be moving from cover to cover to try and flank you. While this is a behavior that usually helps make the gameplay better by being more dynamic, like in Uncharted 2 where this sometimes occurs. Though in those cases it’s usually only one or two enemies, and they are usually very slow and careful in their movements to get into that flanking position. In Uncharted 3 however they are much quicker about getting behind you, or to one of your blind sides, and often a good number of the enemies are trying to flank you, or are at least moving around unnecessarily between cover.

Now this might be because something was changed in the AI to make them more aggressive, but it could merely be something related to the level design. When you got in shoot outs with enemies in areas in Uncharted 2 it was clear where they were coming from, you usually engaged with them in the medium to short range, and there was typically protection for you to make it difficult for enemies to flank or get behind you. If you were flanked it was typically because you were out of position, or had pushed forward too much.

In Uncharted 3 the combat areas are sometimes far too large to tell where enemies are coming from let alone where you should be protecting yourself from, and are designed so that you are fighting enemies both really close and really far away from you. Additionally there are a couple of combat areas where there are sort of alley ways on the sides of it where enemies use to sneak up on you without you noticing because the alley ways hide them by being mostly enclosed.

I should note though that this problem might have existed in Uncharted 2, but was not as noticeable because for most of Uncharted 2 you were always with one or two other people who would engage the enemies with you. However in Uncharted 3 you spend a much more time as Drake by himself, and when you do have that additional AI partner the problems seem more manageable since the enemies are not singular focused on you alone.

What Changed (for the better):

I feel I should note after talking this whole time about changes that were bad, that there were some good changes to the game. Now you can throw back enemy grenades, which is helpful because in Uncharted 2 when a grenade landed near you it was a mad scramble to get away from it. But now if I am quick enough, I can not only throw it back but maybe get an enemy or two with it as well, which is both more frantic and more rewarding.

One small change, but was one I greatly appreciated especially after going back to play Uncharted 2, was that when you go to pick up ammo in Uncharted 3 you automatically grab all nearby ammo for guns that you have. It certainly solved the problem of moving around after a fire fight and picking up all the ammo, yet somehow accidently picking up a different gun because you were slightly closer to it then you were towards the ammo you were trying to get.

This last one is a bit subtle, and was something that rarely happened, but when it did it was incredibly useful. Basically if you were in a firefight and in cover, if you could move somewhere else without any of the enemies seeing you all the enemies would continue to aim at and fire at the location they last saw you at. When I was able to pull it off, or could pull it off, it was a great way to get them looking the wrong way while I got a better angle on some of the enemies.

Conclusion:

The thing that needs to be said about all of the changes is that none of them are particularly unreasonable. Individually I can understand why they were done, or at least what the rationale would have been. But unfortunately, collectively, they ended up ruining much of my experience with the combat in Uncharted 3. I would still recommend everyone play Uncharted 3, I would just suggest you play it on one of the lower difficulties, (not on normal.)