The characteristic that sets games apart from other artistic mediums is that they are not a passive experience. When we watch movies or read books, we are being taken along for a ride. But in games, we have the ability to shape the outcome of a story or situation with our own creativity, even if we are somewhat limited by the rules or technical limitations of the game. Or at least that’s the theory, anyway.
In practice, games (particularly action games) have been steadily making the move to become more like cinema. The on-rails, Michael Bay-like experience of playing a Call of Duty game, where the only impact the player has on a situation generally has to do with how quickly he can kill all the bad guys on the screen, is becoming the norm with first person shooters. Call of Duty is currently the highest-grossing game franchise in the world, so the linear experience must be what most gamers want, right? Well, not really.
The past 5 years have seen the release of Grand Theft Auto 4, Red Dead Redemption, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, TES IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas -- all very successful titles. Yet, the gaming industry seems to have taken the wrong lesson from the success of these games. The GTA games sell a lot of copies? Great, make more sandbox games that take place in cities with gangsters. Fallout 3 was a success? Great, make more post-apocalyptic games.
The lesson should have been “make more games that give the player choices.” Granted, I haven’t even mentioned games like Far Cry 2 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R, so it’s not that I feel there’s a dearth of open-world games per se, but even most of these games have a rigidity to their mechanics that could be loosened to provide the player with more meaningful choices.
That brings me to my next point, which is that freedom isn’t necessarily limited to sandbox-type games. Sadly, there have only been a few games to explore the idea of giving the player the freedom to approach a given situation or set-piece in multiple ways, most of them released in 90’s. I think this is where the most untapped potential for the future of gameplay lies, because it allows for both the structure and pacing afforded by linearity, as well as the satisfaction of using one’s own creativity to complete an objective any way one see fit.
The only current-gen game that I can think of that falls into the latter category is Crysis, a game that is often accused of having pretty graphics but lackluster gameplay. I can see how so many people have come to this conclusion. Crysis works so well that no matter how you play it, it feels like it was designed to be played that way. Players who didn’t push the limits of the game and simply ran from place shooting people could easily come to the conclusion that the game is just a generic run-and-gun FPS. I’m currently playing through it using purely stealth and if I didn’t know better I’d swear it was meant to be played only this way. The game doesn’t punish the player for choosing one option over the other.
The most classic example of this style is Deus Ex. Released in 2000 by Ion Storm under the helm of Warren Spector, Deus Ex is a game that consistently appears on “greatest of all time” lists, and is spoken of with reverence by its ever-growing fanbase. The most interesting thing about Deus Ex’s continued popularity is the fact that the game is, in many ways, deeply flawed. The voice acting is some of the worst I’ve heard in a game. The AI is laughably silly. The character animations are hilariously stiff. The combat is often clunky and imprecise. Did I also mention that it’s my favorite game ever?
Deus Ex fully embodies the philosophy of player choice. Not only are the levels designed to be open and encourage multiple approaches and paths, but the player can also choose upgrades to their character that help hone their chosen style of play. Want to talk your way through things? You can do that. Want to sneak through the levels and avoid combat? That’s fine. Want to go fuckin’ Rambo on everyone’s asses with a rocket launcher? That’s OK too, as is any combination of the three.
Not every feature in Deus Ex was perfect, but the underlying design principles were so solid that they made the game an absolute joy to play.
The unfortunate thing is that no one seemed to learn anything from Deus Ex. The open world games I mentioned above are great and all, but they still all contain very inflexible gameplay rules, whereas the boundaries in Deus Ex were more vague. It was perfectly possible to deal with a situation in a way the developers may have never anticipated -- the closet thing to emergent gameplay we’ve seen.
Time will tell if future games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution capitalizes in these traits, but the videos released so far aren’t very heartening. Hopefully a developer will come along soon and bring back some of these ideas that have been floundering for the last decade.
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