Old Games Journalism & Diablo's Grind Problem

Thinking about some of the backlash around Diablo 3 recently - without having the somewhat masochistic urge to play it myself - some thoughts started to slot together around objectivity in video games criticism, and the ways in which we judge and award certain mechanics.

It seems to me as if, awesome a pursuit though it is, New Games Journalism has not achieved widespread adoption (not that Kieron was necessarily seeking as much). If the emphasis in games criticism were on subjective response then the Gamespots and IGNs of this world would be giving games like Diablo a far broader spectrum of scores that reflect opinions like Walker's, rather than the full house of scores in the 80s and 90s it's currently sporting. No, games criticism tends to make some claim to objectivity.

As long as we're treading this path, objectivity needs some rules, and top amongst them must be that a critic's job is to report the actual quality of the actual game. When he awards a game 90% it's because the game was good. Obvious enough.

In order to do that, reviewers tend to avoid referencing (explicitly or otherwise) anything that isn't common to their audience (or a decent chunk of it). Tractor Sim can't be a great game because I grew up on a farm and found it enticingly authentic. Unless, that is, I run Sim Tractor Fan and can safely assume my audience shares those interests.

Critics also tend not just to report their subjective response; they identify it, analyse it, and report the facts about the game which causally underpin it, so that they can explain to an audience with similar tastes what it is about the game that they will or won't appreciate.

When we consider what it is about a game that contributes to its quality the interesting thing that crops up is that it can't be anything that isn't relatively unique to this game. When the first talkies were made their dialogues were rightly praised for all the obvious reasons. Years later, when almost all films feature speech, it would be ludicrous to praise a film for doing so. This is not, of course, to say that the dialogue contributes nothing to the film.

I'm going to argue that there are techniques in games that are analogous, and there are techniques that are still on the cusp of familiarity. We would no longer praise a game for simply featuring physics; but we're still at a stage where a game's physics may be such a step up that it makes sense to laud them critically. Presumably there will come a time when no more advances can be made in that area.

The techniques I have in mind, though, are exemplified by Diablo 3, but also by a growing number of other titles, not to mention the vast majority of successful Kongregate games. Levelling up, RPG elements, character progression... whatever you want to call the steady grind of selecting and unlocking new toys that's a part of everything from Saints Row to Infinity Blade to Farmville - I'm arguing their critical heyday ought be over.

These systems are powerful models of psychological manipulation. This in itself is no problem - manipulation is what we do in games. But these mechanics are so effective - and hence so widely used - that just like using physics in your game, their critical impact ought to be zero. If this game can be rendered engaging in just this way, what can we really say about Diablo 3 other than that it's the same sort of thing with prettier graphics? What is there in Diablo beyond the grind? Why should this sort of entertainment be identified as anything that's even vaguely unique to a particular game?

Diablo was a great game. It did something other games hadn't done - at least not so well. Diablo 3 doesn't exist in the same environment. The major publications may be tied to an objective way of doing things that promises to tell people how fun they'll find the game rather than how much the reviewer liked it, but that need not mean they must award five stars to any game that entertains regardless of how it does so.

Games Are Stories: The Final Word?

This post originally published at GAMESbrief.

Nicholas Lovell argued recently that 'games are not stories'. As much as he's obviously after a sound-bite the TV chaps will lap up, he justifies a slightly more considered version of the statement with reference to the (true) fact that story tends to be less important in games than in mediums like film or literature. I think Nicholas overestimates slightly how important story is to those other mediums - surely script in those areas is often just as susceptible to the whims of various directors, editors and actors as it is in our own - but I take the point. A movie, no matter how Hollywood it may be, begins with a script. A game, almost always, begins with gameplay and setting.

That's interesting in itself, though. I've never come onto a job where either of those two were particularly up in the air - it's always a sci-fi mmo, or a desert shooter, or a zombie RPG... The setting, it seems, comes in the same breath as the core gameplay. I'd argue that this suggests an alternative take on games - that, in fact, they revolve centrally around their narrative contexts, that these are chosen to work in harmony with the mechanics and that every scrap of work done after that decision is t its best when it works toward both of those goals.

There is a reason that we play cowboy games, and football games; and not precision clicking tests or abstract tactical challenges. A random coloured shape serves all the mechanical purposes of a heavily armed nazi, but we prefer it when our actions in games carry weight and meaning.

I'm reminded of the various discussions that go on around games being fun vs not-fun. It's supposed by some that games need to break free from being fun in order to be important; to be what games are supposed to be. Others say fun is the whole point of games - why would we want to play anything else? Both sides seem to miss the point - a game needs to be entertaining. Like any other creative medium, if we wanted the bare facts we'd look elsewhere. But fun is just a subset of entertainment; not-fun games canstill be entertaining.

I think when we try to argue whether games are or are not about 'story' we end up talking about writing, and opinion is predictably split. Some love cutscenes, others hate them. That's not one we need to solve. But we should be careful trying to claim that games aren't about story, because without story we'd still be playing stuff that looks and feels like tic-tac-toe.

Writing & VO Direction: My New Video Demo

So a couple of months back I was approached to write and direct a character trailer to show off the technology and know-how at Cubic Motion, Wave Studios and 3Lateral. The result is due some further polish, but is mostly complete, and is embedded below for anyone interested.

The character was in place before I began, and he's not the sort of chap I would tend to jump at the chance to write for. Let's say he's Binary Domain rather than Penumbra. So the script I produced was in some sense coming from that place. It's about this traditional video game brute who sees and feels threatened by the rise of the more complex, nuanced characters around him. Ultimately he takes comfort in the thought that people like him will always pervade; there will always be room for the big dumb action hero, and provided we have alternatives why on earth would we want things any other way?

There are a couple of audio picks I'm not sure about, but the guys at the various studios involved have turned out a great result. Hope you enjoy it.

Mass Effect 3 vs Skyrim: Worth Writing Home About?

Two rather major RPGs came out in recent months. ME3 I eagerly anticipated, having found No.2 a radical gameplay improvement on the first, but losing all my saves before I finished it. The Elder Scrolls I've always found less love for - its writing, acting and branching is less advanced, and (as has been noted before) it feels like an MMO without the other people. Here's what I think now, having played through a reasonable amount, though not all, of the content in each.

Mass Effect 3
The big news for me was this: Mass Effect 3, like Dragon Age 2 before it, feels like a stripped back version of its predecessor. This looks like a finished game; but the RPG elements all feel tacked on, and the combat remains inferior to a dedicated action game.

We know, of course, that the RPG elements aren't really meant to be inferior; they've just been 'streamlined'. Perhaps that's a way of saying 'more accessible to console players', perhaps it means 'reduced in scope in order to meet the tight deadine'. Either way Bioware seem certain of their trajectory, and sales figures would seem to support that; but as far as I'm concerned they've gutted their RPG.

Each of these factors is minor in its own right, but between them they add up to a deeply dissatisfying experience when compared with ME2):

- Special abilities feel like magic rather than tech. Grenades and special bullets aren't thrown or fired, they just materialise at the target. Tech discovered in the field is scanned by your magic arm and then disappears.

- Shopping, trading and weapon customisation is drastically simple.There's next to no mythology here, or discovery: just buy the Mk IV version of your assault rifle and crack on. Like ME2, shops themselves are accessed via a computer interface, removing any remaining sense that this is anything but a statistical level up.

- There are no more large hub areas, only smaller ones connected by lift. I grant that in function five small areas is no different to one large one, but again it demonstrates this unwillingness on Bioware's part to allow suspension of disbelief to get in the way of functionality.The citadel was once a huge, exciting place filled with sub-quests, engaging characters and hidden gems in back street traders. Now you run from lift to office, trigger that conversation, then head back for the lift. Even the traders can be accessed remotely from the Normandy. There is an entire, three floor night club in the game; it has two talkable NPCs, of which one is already on your team.This doesn't feel like a world, it feels like the mechanical foundations of a world.

- The levels themselves feel far more like generic man-shoots than they ever did. Most are set in brown, debris-covered battlefields where you fight the same old guys again and again. Your squad is largely useless. There's little story here: few in depth conversations, no interesting cut scenes, just 'Go here, retrieve this, kill these dudes'. There's no sense that these are real places, or anything other than a set of corridors between combat scenes. Readable notes are few and far between, and strangely arbitrary in their content. Datapads are as likely to win you credits as information. Medkits for some reason give you XP.

- Perhaps most damningly, the dialogue system has been further simplified. Gone is any pretence that conversations are anything but formally structured. It becomes de rigeuer: someone says something, you can ask more, or you be can nice or nasty. The latter affects your paragon bar and little else. How it affects the bar is familiarly flawed. Even the way secondary missions are now issued suggests Bioware's faith in its audience's willingness to put up with dialogue is fast dwindling: now you only need walk past and overhear a dialogue in the hub to be issued that mission; often it pops up in your (rather uninformative) journal and you're left with no idea where it came from.

It pains me to say it, but ME3 feels founded in the (perhaps justified for many consumers) belief that we don't need dramatic dressing up of the mechanics provided the mechanics themselves work as expected. I know that Mass Effect is pretty, and has reasonable shooting, and has a far more involved narrative than any other action game you care to mention. I think, though, that it finally deserves to be considered in these terms (as action game first), and not the way that it started life. This is a Call of Duty behemoth that will continue to succeed on the momentum of its marketing and the maintenance of its core systems; but it stopped being a Bioware RPG some time ago.

Polish: 1 out of 2

Tilt: 0 out of 2

(Scoring explained here)

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Frankly, everything I liked and disliked about Oblivion still holds for Skyrim. The writing isn't always the most interesting (and is certainly more verbose than is necessary, but I often feel like that's half the point). There's next to no roleplaying, decision making or involvement in narrative beyond the choice of which quests you take on. The world itself is as impressive and free as ever.

As is usually noted, Skyrim is at its strongest when you, the player character, take your fate in your hands. Played the completionist way I traditionally play RPGs it all falls apart: try to explore every town, complete every quest and you'll quickly loose track of exactly why you're in another haunted crypt, what you're looking for, and who you are and what your story is. You relegate the game to its base combat mechanics.

The beauty of Skyrim is that through its comparatively simplistic questing system it's able to provide an incredibly open experience. First few quests aside, I couldn't care less that I'm a 'Dragonborn'; if it weren't for the beautiful pilgrimage up to the snowy mountain peak I wouldn't have bothered finding out. What I really wanted to do was trek across to the Bard's College in Solitude and earn my stripes as a wordsmith. I recovered a lost manuscript, helped my tutor to fill in the blanks, and then presented it to the Jarl as a way to defend the freedom of speech festival that was under threat of a ban. These are my priorities, this is the person I'm playing, and this is my story. Skyrim works much better when you follow single threads to their completion; when you put the story (both written and constructed by you on the fly) at the centre of the experience. Suddenly all those shopkeepers with all those fetch quests and optional anecdotes slip into a more natural role. If you need a new tunic, Wolfgar's heard there's a well-regarded retailer's in Winterhelm. You may or may not care. Being picky about the quests you take on keeps those you do coherent with your character and your story. And when it works it's engaging.

What I hate about Skyrim is that it feels - for me sooner rather than later - so shallow. Sure it's huge, sure it's detailed. But ultimately it's about running places and hitting things with swords, and often under the lightest and least inventive of pretences. It's such a shame that being a bard in training is so remarkably similar to being a warrior in training: go to this dungeon, collect three magic weapons / musical instruments. Ultimately the game falls down in just the same way GTA sometimes does: for all its surface glamour, for its high production values and efforts to skin the experience with an involving story and detailed open world, it all eventually boils down to going somewhere and killing everyone. Games like Heavy Rain and Planescape showed us that story can be more central to gameplay than that, and that just because your core gameplay loop is combat-based doesn't mean every experience has to be along the same lines.

Polish: 1 out of 2

Tilt: 0 out of 2

(Scoring explained here)