Unfettered Blather

Welcome, welcome to the 5th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The dirty little secret of gaming is that most of us don’t finish games. Games fall into three categories of completion for me. The first is I actually bothered to finish it. Not the ridiculous 100% completion like doing everything you could in Vice City, but at least playing through the main campaign, story, or whatever at least once from start to finish. This is pretty rare, but occasionally I get a game with enough momentum or motivation to make me want to finish. The second is the more common category of playing a game until I feel I am done with it. I may never finish the game but I’ll at least give it a good play through. At some point the momentum and motivation wear off and I move on to something else. The last are games I stop playing because they made me see red. I hate these games.

See, a game can be pretty bad and I’ll keep playing it. No matter how much or how little I pay for a game I still want to feel as though I’ve gotten some value out of it. A bad game may not hold my attention as long, but I’ll walk away from it more or less amicably. For example, why keep playing Perfect Dark Zero when I own Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4?

Games that make me see red are ones I have to quit because I don’t really want to see my controller half lodged in the screen of my now cracked and broken TV. An interesting point about these games is that they all tend to focus on poor game design that we’ve known about for decades now. See, that is actually the most frustrating thing. Even before the Internet we had a gaming culture that often and rabidly discussed poor game design. That game designers and developers continue to make the same mistakes time after time shows a sort of tin eared stubbornness that would be somewhat admirable if they were trying to hold some sort of moral high ground and not just cranking out escapist entertainment for a bunch of man-children.

So in the spirit of this month’s Blog Banter I am supposed to pick a game I didn’t complete because of some inherent design flaw or decision in the game, but where to start? Just one? Should I talk about the ridiculous timed missions in Transformers or the ridiculous quick-time melee events in Call of Duty 3? The cheating AI of Bankshot Billiards perhaps? The ridiculous non-free world main story missions of Saint’s Row that no one ever liked in Grand Theft Auto either and only ever did them to unlock stuff? The boring repetitive button mashing fest of Justice League Heroes? The open but empty world of Just Cause? The ridiculous grind of Test Drive Unlimited? The outright punishing of players in Urban Chaos? The slavish follower of FPS conventions that was Red Steel? (Not to mention the irony of it slavishly following those conventions) That’s not even all of them, not even from the games I purchased this year! Ok, fine, I haven’t truly quit all of those games but every one I just mentioned incorporate a design decision that has been derided by players even before those games were in development. It is as though game designers use those complaints as a feature list for their next game sometimes.

Now that I’ve indulged myself, I am going to talk about Transformers. Open-world concept, sandbox elements. Not total freedom but maybe a nice mix somewhere between Grand Theft Auto III and Burnout Paradise. It makes two fatal mistakes. The first mistake is that despite having this open world to roam around in, the missions are scripted linear events. This was always my problem with the Grand Theft Auto games ever since they went 3D. Sure, I’m still tooling around in the same city, but now I have objectives. Crackdown got this right by not forcing you onto a mission path in order to advance the game. The villains were all part of the world and you could just as easily stumble across them. The lack of integration made the game feel forced and contrived. A shame because I thought they nailed the scale of being a giant robot.

The second mistake was having enemies who can block every attack but have an attack you can’t block. This is just cheap. It’s also something we got tired of in the 80’s. It’s contrived and stupid. No one likes it, no one thinks its clever. If this is a game designed for kids they’re going to get frustrated and quit. If it’s a game designed for adults they’re going to call you on your stupid design decision. That might actually be a fourth mistake, is that the game doesn’t seem to know who its core audience is, but that has nothing to do with me not wanting to keep playing so I’ll leave it be.

The third and final mistake I’m going to cover is mission timers. I hate mission timers. Portal had a mission timer but Valve said the final mission only had the timer to create artificial tension. The final puzzle is not that hard and in fact the timer puts pressure on the player that otherwise wouldn’t be there. Portal actually got it right. For the most part though, timers are stupid. “Kill 25 enemies in 3 minutes”. Look, I don’t have unlimited health. Killing 25 enemies by myself is not a cakewalk. The mission requirement by itself should be difficult enough. Throwing in the timer is needless frustration.

Actually, I lied, there is a fourth mistake, they use escort missions. Would game designers pull their heads out of their collective asses and realize how much escort missions suck? It’s a neat idea in theory. I know, they do it all the time in movies, but that’s all scripted. At least in Call of Duty 4 your escorting a tank and the payoff is that it destroys another tank when you need it. Plus said tank lets you go on ahead and clear out all the RPG nests that might harm it. It’s a rare instance of getting it right. Transformers does not get it right, it does like most games and has the subject of your protection go charging blindly into enemy fire while you attempt to keep it safe. Oh yes, they’re timing you to.

Look, this isn’t all that hard. If you want to do an open world concept with Transforming robots I’m all for it. There were concepts they got right such as good and evil actions. You don’t need to put in artificial missions, timers, escort missions, and enemies with contrived bull$#!^ shields. Create a map, stick Megatron and the other baddies somewhere in there and let their discovery trigger events. Players will fill in their own narrative.

What’s amazing is that playing Transformers it becomes apparent that a lot of effort went into the game, and a lot of thought as well. It would not have taken more effort to make a good game out of it. Instead they put a lot of sweat and tears into an empty game. A game that starts out strong but quickly loses momentum. There is no good reason for this to be a bad game.

Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Silvercublogger, Triage Effect, Gamer Unit, Delayed Responsibility, Man Bytes Blog, CrazyKinux’s Musing, Zath!, Draining Souls.net, Game Couch, 8-Bit Brigade, thoughts and rants, Hawty McBloggy

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