Sandbox Versus The Scripted Pipe: 5-0

I avoided FPS games for good many years only trying one out occasionally if hype had been strong enough. Partly this was due to my time spent playing transferring more and more to the different consoles instead of PC - I genuinely thought mouse & keyboard were the only way to play an FPS. With Halo I tried to make an exception but got bored after a few hours of game play and majority of the gripes I have were not that prominently displayed in it.

The next brief trial came with Gears of War and a bit later Bioshock. GoW tucked my heartstrings because of it's apocalyptic theme and Bioshock had just the right milieu to have my full attention. It took me year and a half getting through GoW (I got stuck in 2 points), with Bioshock I had no problems getting through in a few days. When I finished GoW I had already played GTA4 and a few similar sandbox titles and felt the game play was somehow lacking the whole time - I was unable to get immersed in both example games. 

Then finally when I was playing Uncharted 2 and hated almost every minute of it I realized that scripted pipes and locked doors or alleyways where I can not enter freely break my immersion in a really bad way. What a Sherlock moment that was. I might be on the slow side but sure enough all the while I had been wondering if the reviewers giving UC2 90-100 scores were playing the same game I was I had not realized that some players can simply ignore the restricted path and enjoy the scenery and plot. Unfortunately I can not anymore. GTA4 & Fallout 3 spoiled me to only accept open sandbox where I can do as I please and if I feel like it also follow the intended plot.

Another recent example is Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption both of which I ended up playing very close to one another due to the release schedules. AW was alright but it was just a performance for me, I performed from checkpoint to the next and waited for chapters to end and ending credits to roll out. It was completely different with RDR, I found myself immersed in the world playing poker hours at a time or just wandering around killing interesting animals and so on. I was actually sad when I finished the game, it felt a great loss that it was over and it would never be a new experience for me. 

What I have learned is that a pad is on par with mouse & keyboard for shooters if the controls have been implemented well and that I hate scripted pipes, no more for me ever. I am at a loss how someone can enjoy something like UC2 citing it the best game in history, there are just so many things wrong in that sentence.

The Timid MMORP Gamer

Massively Multiplayer has been all the rage after Blizzard introduced the westerners to the wonderful world of nolifeism and hit the jackpot with the money making machine that WoW is. The designed way to experience an average MMORPG is built around grouping be it guildies or total strangers in co-op or against each other, this is the way you are supposed to play.

Well, I hate it. I enjoy co-opping with friends and guildies to accomplish major things but I absolutely hate playing against a human opponent and I hate almost more the fact that I don’t have possibility to solo all content without interaction with other humans.

Group play has next to no redeeming qualities. People need breaks, there is a major quota of jerks around in general public and you need to share the loot and the jerk populace can make fair sharing an impossibility. Communication is clumsy when you need to type to get a point across. When you are in Vent or TS … why exactly would I want to talk to strangers, maybe I want to listen to Black Sabbath at full blast and could not care less what the others are saying. Again, grouping with guildies and using a voice chat can be very fulfilling but that’s it and guildies and friends are not available 24/7 for playing when I want.

In most MMORPGs there is an ongoing debate between the solo enthusiast and group fanatics that seem to think enabling more solo play is a direct personal insult to them. Solo players request more content to be available for solo play and the others rage against any such concessions. The question is where is the harm in allowing all of the content to be playable solo? If grouping is such a superior way to play surely there will be enough people that continue doing so even if amount of soloable content is expanded. By all means go ahead and scale the loot and xp so that grouping is still lucrative but do not treat the solo minded as a second class citizen just for fun. For some players the only desirable interaction is to be able to trade with others through a preferably very advanced auctioning system that minimizes direct contact.

The simplest way to address this and make everyone happy is to make all of the content scale dynamically according to how many people are playing. At the same fell swoop remove group size limits because it makes no sense that for example instances in WoW are 5, 10 or 25 man, make them all 1-40 man and be done with it. This will in no way harm anyone’s gaming experience, it makes it richer and gives the paying customer more ways to enjoy the content.

To illustrate that I have some experience I have played the following MMORPGs: Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, EVE Online, Runes of Magic, LOTRO, WoW and Aion – all of these had artificial restrictions on solo play and it does not need to be so.

Tide of Cheap Games Is Drowning Us

In a good way. Digital distribution, webshopping and eBay with easy to use pay options have broken the floodgates and gaming enthusiasts are literally drowning in titles. Torchlight for 4EUR in Steam - gotta get me one, Easter sale on gamestation - gotta get me six (games most of which I will not play ever) and Conker's Bad Fur Day for pittance in eBay - just have to have it. Over the last years my gaming title purchases have skyrocketed but the amount of money spent has only gone up moderately, bargains are easier to find in the www-era and where there are bargains there are people wanting to make some.

Only problem is that the amount of time available for playing has not changed much one way or the other and attention must be paid to where that precious time is spent. I almost regret I played close to 20h Batman: Arkham Asylum because I have a backlog of ~20 games and as soon as I felt the game was mediocre I should have stopped and changed to another game. Oh well, some people do not have OCD to finish what they started, but I do. I still lament that I quit Gears of War near the end when I got stuck and I will not get rest until I finish it one day - maybe next year.

The games themselves are not getting any better or worse. Sure, technically we have come far from Space Invaders but the absolute goodness of a game is dependant on what is available, back in the day 3/4 of a pie was a charismatic protagonist and for a plot it was enough to send him after some pills in a labyrinth. Today the pie has been replaced with a higher polygon count blob that sometimes resembles a muscle sculpture better at home in a Pride parade and sometimes the blob has 34DD gravity defying floaters to keep her balanced in the hectic action but both are still after the pills - nowadays the labyrinth is more often a jungle or a city and the pills are nazi gold or weird artefacts but fundamentally very little has changed aside from the polygon count.

Word of the times is "More" and more is what we have for better or worse.

Difficulty Levels, Perceived or Othervise

Difficulty levels have been around from the beginning, even Pong had them as well as Game & Watch handhelds and so on. The concept is simple: to ensure gaming enjoyment for people with different skills and add replay value there are typically few difficulty levels in each and every game or the game incorporates something more sophisticated like some simulators that allow tuning of the realism settings and behavior of the opponents and also there are games that can adapt the difficulty dynamically on the fly based on how the player is progressing.

Difficulty levels are for most part a good thing. There are annoyances however. The biggest problem is if difficulty is accomplished in an unfair manner and as an example rubber band AI in driving games is one of the worst offenders. Sure it sounds good on paper, but essentially removes need for skill in the game and replaces that with exactly nothing. No matter if you crash five times or have a clean race the final stretch of the race looks exactly the same, you are winning with a predefined margin. I can't understand who would think this kind of system is good for anything, yet it is quite common especially in racing games.

Back in the nineties I was a glutton for punishment. I tended to play on Hard or Insane or whatever the highest difficulties were named. I also had more time to dedicate to gaming. Endless retries and the high after getting through were the shit back then and I mocked those not so HC that had to resort to the Normal or *gasp* even easier difficulties. Then I woke up. At one point I realized I was not getting anything other out of that than a high blood pressure and also the pile of broken game controllers was growing fast. Games took much more time to complete and I also was traumatized a little bit if a game proved to be too difficult for me to sort out without cheating. I started to play on Normal and for known difficult games I started playing on Easy and I have not looked back since.

On average my gaming experience is nowadays very enjoyable and smooth and I have very little tolerance for unfair game design and artificial obstacles to make game last longer - newsflash, concise game design with tight storyline and least amount of gimmicky tricks to keep me playing for longer than necessary are infinitely better than the alternative. A very easy remedy to this is allowing free saves anywhere and as often as needed or some sort of checkpoint system or similar. There is no good reason not to include these unless the intention is just to give the finger to the consumer anyway.

A fairly recent encounter with a 'right' kind of difficulty level (but with a critical flaw in implementing the levels) was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I played it on Normal and there was exactly one point when I wished I had started on Easy: the two titans just before the final boss match. I know this game is perceived to be very easy on the two lowest difficulty levels, but for me it was just perfect. Had there been more occasions where I doubted my choice of difficulty I would have probably not played the game through especially since it did not allow changing difficulty level mid game. This was the only stupidity in the technical design of the game, why not allow changing it other than to piss the players off. My point here is that there should have been a choice for me to drop the level to Easy after 15 tries with the titans, I wonder why there was not. It was very close that I stopped playing then and there.

There are some trends to be observed in the market and among the players. First of all, games are getting easier. I am not sure if you even can fail in Heavy Rain or do you get through no matter how you mash the buttons and this is such a contrast to early days of gaming and the comparison I have in mind is Dragon's Lair. You had to know exactly the action sequence and there was zero room for error, life was lost if you made one wrong press. There are lots and lots of games where you can't fail at all and I suppose that is all well and good up to a point, certainly makes sure people get to see the ending credits which was a rarity back in the eighties. The problem is that at some point games start playing themselves reducing the interaction required from the gamer close to zero and what's the point in that? Movies are already a zero response required entertainment and majority of the scripts are better than in games so why play at all if that is where games are going. Secondly I believe I am not alone in being satisfied with shorter and easier games if I feel I had enough possibilities to take part into the events and things were 'fair' all around and there were no silly obstacles between me and the end. I used to prefer 100+ hour games back in the day and nowadays the game has to be something extrodinary for me to dedicate more than 20 hours to it (like GTA or Fallout).

I have somewhat schizophrenic view on difficulty levels and perceived difficulty in games and my attitude has changed a lot over time. As a broad generalization I draw a conclusion that as I have gotten older and more seasoned the tolerance for annoyances and wrong kind of difficulties during the game play has gotten lower and I demand a smoother experience but on the other hand I still want to play the games myself, feel that I am accomplishing something and not just watch from the sidelines. There are some tricks that are enough to help a geriatric gamer to get to the end that do not take the taste out of the drink and one of them is the free saving. Please put that to all games from now on. And checkpoints... and when I am stuck, give me a chance to cheat my way through, also include 100% of the game's content to all difficulty levels because a game is not so good that I would play it twice, kthxbye.

The Saboteur, Diamond in The Rough

Buckets of bad reviews and a turkey award or two seem to be the thanks to Pandemic studios and their efforts to make their mark in the gaming world.

After mediocre success with Mercenaries 2 Electronic Arts announced disbanding the team already before their swansong to be was finished. The Saboteur was released Dec. 2009 to not so very anticipating audience and mainstream media proceeded to bash the game to the ground. Granted that the different versions were riddled with bugs and PC version suffered from crippling compatibility issues with ATi cards but now that the game has been fixed it deserves a looking into and Pandemic deserves a proper obituary if you will.

I started the game with very little expectations aside from knowing it was a sandbox à la GTA and featured b&w visuals and some Nazi destroying action in WW2 city of lights - Paris. The controls were familiar, graphics (on a heavy duty gaming rig PC) superb and the soundtrack from the get go something for others to strive for.

The initial impression was that of a pleasant surprise. Sean (the protagonist) moved, sounded and behaved in a satisfying manner and was quite a capable hero. The cast and voice acting has been thoroughly bashed, but I had no problems living with both. In fact, the Inglorious Bastards meets Allo' Allo' with a dose of serious to keep things from getting out of hand was good enough for me. Maybe the voice acting does not drill one's ears so much if the person is not a German, Irish, French or British.

Main storyline is a bit bland but lacks repetitiveness that most sandbox games suffer from. The main and side quests are varied and feature checkpoints for the clumsy of hand and I can't remember a quest I would have hated or been thoroughly frustrated with. This is something that rarely is the case with similar open world games and a blessing to us less twitch oriented gamers. As added bonus mouse + keyboard and Xbox pad work flawlessly together, pad recommended for driving and mouse for letting the guns do the talking.

Then we get to the beef, the side activities are just marvellous. There are enough free play activities to keep even the most hc gamer occupied for weeks. Literally hundreds dots litter the Paris map when you look for stuff to do. Blow up fuel depots, AA stations, train bridges, supply trucks, propaganda speakers, guard towers, assassinate generals and other dignitaries, sneak into bases and silently take out entire platoons of unsuspecting nazies, steal cars, tanks, motorcycles and assault vehicles or run on the rooftops in search of supplies and viewpoints... and this list only scratches the surface of what you can do in Paris if you so choose. To top things off you get new abilities (touch of death, for those silent takeouts from the front etc.) and gear (guns, cars, explosives etc.) from accomplishing certain feats.

Stealth mechanics of the game have been critizised for being difficult and less efficient method of getting forward in the game but I have to disagree. If you are stealthing I would say it can be expected that you are not going to proceed as quickly through a base of enemies than if you choose frontal assault and manage to pull it off. I thoroughly enjoyed the brain teaser aspect of trying to take an entire base without one alarm and the satisfaction after having accomplished that was just overwhelming for me.

And then for the main character of any sandbox game, the city and the surroundings. I do not know if you have to be older or what is the reason that Paris spoke to me more than Liberty or Vice City or even the wasteland which I previously held unsurpassed as a milieu. Maybe the bleak b&w graphics with red blood and flags with the very atmospheric soundtrack and returning of colour when an area was liberated were the gimmics that got to me but I have to say I do not expect any sandbox to outdo Paris any time soon. Beautiful, just beautiful.

92 points and a must have tag

Magnifique:
Graphics
Atmosphere, milieu and soundtrack
Paris
Abundance of things to do & accomplish
Stealthing & climbing
Cabaret

Donnerwetter:
Shortish, but what's the rush, there is plenty to do in Paris after the main storyline
Some bugs remain
A dash of humour could have saved a lot

Go get this game, it is dirt cheap already ;)

Now what was I going to write...

Gamers are getting older and average age of people gaming is getting higher even though youth is embracing the hobby earlier and in larger numbers than ever in the history of videogames.

Inevitably this will lead to differing consumer segments in the games market - a senior requires something else to fully enjoy a game than lets say a kindergardener. Ergonomy and ease of use will eventually become relevant to the aging gamer and through that they will become relevant to those wanting to do business with games.

I am only 40 years currently, but as a gamer I am ancient. I started with Philips Videopac G7000 or Magnavox Odyssey^2 for the oceanically challenged back in 1979. I took a firm hold of the flimsy joystick and never let go. I feel that mainstream gaming media is doing no favours for us more mature players. Granted that the segment is currently small, but it is getting bigger by day and those taking it into account can tap into market that has significantly more free capital to invest into their hobby.

Luxury perhiperals and premium content for the games are just a click away in the webshops and game's internal servers for those with credit cards and willingness to use them to enhance playing experience. This is already a growing trend in the gaming market. EQ started with premium servers and service for those willing to pay a ridiculous monthly fee and for real life money you can get extra stuff legally and against the terms of service in majority of subscription based online games.

And I am all for it. I do not have lightning reflexes anymore and I do not derive enjoyment in games in a similar manner as I did 15 years ago. I do not anymore need games lasting 200 hours and I am far too lazy to put up with much inconveniences when I want to play but to make me into a lucrative customer I am willing to pay for a smooth experience that rubs my ego and avatar the right way.

From this viewpoint I intend to occasionally offer my 3 cents around games and gaming.