Quest to Nowhere

Good Writing is not the Future of Gaming

To say that good writing is the future of video games is, I think, a bit sort sighted. Video games have generally had relatively good writing, which has really gotten only better over the years. There has been a jump recently in the quality of writing, but it’s not because of game studios hiring good writers.

The problem with writing in video games has generally been that writers have traditionally been brought on board to work on a game toward the end of its development. And are tasked with writing a story that ties together everything the game designers and developers have made. Only in the past few years have studios begun to have writers on the team from the beginning, so that the story of the game is developed alongside the game’s development.

This has of course greatly improved the quality of writing in the games where this happens (ie: Portal 1 and 2, the Mass Effect series, and Skyrim.) And this is something other studios are going to take notice of, especially as the games that handle writing this way sell very well.

But the future of games is not in good writing, but in good storytelling. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it’s an important subtlety. Writing is very important in traditional mediums like books, movies, TV, comics, etc., because these are generally passive mediums where you as the consumer of it have not effect on what is going to happen, while video games are an interactive medium, and require constant input from the player for something to happen.

And so whilst video games are being used now to tell the story a writer came up with, the real potential of the medium is in the player creating their own story while they are playing. For example, maybe you built an amazing structure in Minecraft only to see it destroyed by some creepers. Or maybe you had a really great run in Call of Duty where you managed to sneak into the enemy’s base, steal their flag, and then capture it at your base without being seen by anyone to win the match. Or perhaps whilst wandering the land of Skyrim you encountered some thugs battling a dragon, and after fighting off the dragon with them they turn on you and kill you. These are all examples of stories created not by a writer, but by the player’s interactions with the game itself.

Now this is not to say that video games don’t need writers, but rather that the art of writing for a video game will for the most part move away from creating a narrative for the player to follow, but will instead become more about writing to support the interactions the player has during the game. So things like writing the history of the game’s world up until the point the game starts, writing the dialogue of non-player characters to respond to players differently based on the actions the player undertakes while playing, and things like that.

There will still be a place for games with a set narrative like Portal, Mass Effect and Uncharted, but the real potential of this interactive medium is to make the player an active participant in creating the story they are playing. This is because these stories are much more powerful and more meaningful to a player, since it was their unique experience and their unique story not just something everyone also experienced.

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.)

A First Person Problem: Objective Storytelling in Videogames Part 2

While I was writing the last piece I came to a realization about an additional rule/criteria for what is needed to tell a good objective story in a videogame. It is however somewhat unrelated to the previous two rules, since it’s not about narrative or gameplay, but rather how the game is presented to the character.

3. The game should not take place primarily in the first person.

This rule basically outlines my problem with a lot of narratives in first person games, most recently Resistance 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The problem with the first person view point is that it implies to the player that they are the character, that the story is subjective when it’s actually not.

The problem with this is that doing this separates the story from the actions the player is taking part in. For example with Resistance 3 you are playing a guy who is leaving his family behind to maybe make a final blow against the evil alien invaders. And while the cut scenes tell a rather interesting personal story of a guy who wants to be with his family, but knows he’s on a suicide mission to maybe save them, and is able to convey the emotions of his situation well. When I’m then trust into his perspective for the actual gameplay stuff I completely forget all that, because I’m not the one experiencing that that guy is.

Basically it creates a disconnect between ourselves and the character, because we can’t see ourselves as that character since we aren’t experiencing those moments as the character. Now if you look at the Half-Life 2 games or the Portal games, you are playing as someone who isn’t you, but for all intents and purposes they are you. They might be named Gordon Freeman or Chell, but everything they do you as the player have control over. Everything they experience, you experience from their perspective. There is never that break where suddenly you are reminded that your aren’t actually that character by showing them in a cut scene, and that makes the experience all that more personal and real for the player.

Would Resistance 3 have been better in the third person? Yes, because then I could have at least had a connection to the character. I might not have been him, but I would have developed some empathy for him that would have gone from the cut scenes into the gameplay.

This was one of the great things about the Uncharted games, especially Uncharted 2. You aren’t Nathan Drake, but you can empathize with him, and the team at Naughty Dog really play that up in the animations he does during the gameplay. When you see a cut scene where Drake is shot in the gut, and then you have to control him while he limps through the level wincing it’s a lot more powerful to the player then if it were in first person and the camera kind of wobbled and they began to move slowly, because even though we aren’t Drake we empathize with him and that’s just as powerful.

For the next post about objective storytelling I’ll probably discuss my problems with the storytelling in Deus Ex: Human Revolution since it’s a good example of a game breaking all these rules I’ve set forth so far.