Aliens Isn't About Shooting Aliens

[martyrdrebel27]

great read, my only complaint is the lack of counterpoints. for every Bulletstorm out there is also a GTA IV with deep, complex characters, with real emotion driving them. even in games that dont place emphasis on "games as art" such as Saint's Row 2, there are heavy moments that affect the player. specifically, gat's revenge in the cemetary, and carlos' death. in fact, for all its emphasis on "zaniness", SR2 is actually a very well written story with good characters.

 

[TAdamson]

great read, my only complaint is the lack of counterpoints. for every Bulletstorm out there is also a GTA IV with deep, complex characters, with real emotion driving them. even in games that dont place emphasis on "games as art" such as Saint's Row 2, there are heavy moments that affect the player. specifically, gat's revenge in the cemetary, and carlos' death. in fact, for all its emphasis on "zaniness", SR2 is actually a very well written story with good characters.

In SR2 the universe is insane which makes the tonal shift between what is said in cutscenes and what happens in game less jarring.

The problem with GTA4 is that in cutscene Niko is a guy with a dark war past that he wants to get away from, but first he wants to get a guy who betrayed him, and out of cutscene he's a complete monster.

To use one of Shamus' more favouriter phrases: This leads to Ludo-Narrative dissonance.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

great read, my only complaint is the lack of counterpoints. for every Bulletstorm out there is also a GTA IV with deep, complex characters, with real emotion driving them. even in games that dont place emphasis on "games as art" such as Saint's Row 2, there are heavy moments that affect the player. specifically, gat's revenge in the cemetary, and carlos' death. in fact, for all its emphasis on "zaniness", SR2 is actually a very well written story with good characters.

In SR2 the universe is insane which makes the tonal shift between what is said in cutscenes and what happens in game less jarring.

The problem with GTA4 is that in cutscene Niko is a guy with a dark war past that he wants to get away from, but first he wants to get a guy who betrayed him, and out of cutscene he's a complete monster.

To use one of Shamus' more favouriter phrases: This leads to Ludo-Narrative dissonance.

to be fair, Niko is only as much of a monster as the person playing him allows. You can certainly spend the entire ride to every mission driving on the sidewalks, but as for the story, the parts of the game outside of our control, Niko is a bad guy with a bad past he wants to escape. The guy he is tracking is a physical manifestation of that past, and as long as the betrayer exists so does Old-World Niko. as far as the monster thing, Niko might too easily embrace the side of him he is claiming to want to escape, but its all out of his control. replay the game, he is a pawn the entire time, almost never acting of his own volition.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

sorry for the double-post but i just wanted to say that imagine a GTA IV where Niko got off the boat to a normal and productive cousin, instead of the slimeball cousin he actually got. Niko could've been an average Joe Applepie. he was a victim of circumstance.

 

[Something Amyss]

I hope you aren't actually suggesting that Kojima's cut scenes are actually engaging.

 

[Your Gaffer]

As soon as someone tries to make their videogame like a movie they have failed. Videogames are a very different medium than film and while I understand the desire to give a game a "cinematic feel" developers should not conflate that with making a movie-like game.

One game that I think got "cinematic feel", for lack of a better word, right was Xenogears. It had an epic storyline, but focused on only a handful of characters. The characters personalities were explored through multiple scenes and interactions with each other. This never came at the expensive of actual gameplay either, except for the second disc cram session, which was only the result of budget and time drying up.

Story needs to be either woven into the gameplay itself or if it must be told in a non-interactive way then the time that you are watching, not playing, needs to be kept to reasonable and short chunks. Most of the cut scenes in Xenogears last only a a few minutes, except of course that section on the 2nd disc. That is how this type of thing should be done.

Last of all developers should realize that games really, really DON'T have to be like movies. There greatest strengths are interactivity, something movies just don't have. Developers should be playing to the strengths of their medium, not trying to ape the medium of film. That is how we end up with stupid things like lens flare in non-driving games.

 

[TAdamson]

to be fair, Niko is only as much of a monster as the person playing him allows.

That's not really true. How many innocent cops do you kill in '4-Leaf Clover'? Nearly every mission is about murdering someone, most times dozens of people. If Niko were the man he was playing in the cutscenes, so tired of killing and death, he'd stop, he's lay down his gun before killing all those cops, or even the hundreds of proported scumbags that he kills otherwise.

You're not Michael Corleone here, you're a butcher.

This I accepted in San Andreas, Vice City and Saint's Row because the inherent goofiness of both settings.

It's the same problem as Uncharted. In cutscenes you're a nice guy. In game you're a wisecracking pyschopath.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

to be fair, Niko is only as much of a monster as the person playing him allows.

That's not really true. How many innocent cops do you kill in '4-Leaf Clover'? Nearly every mission is about murdering someone, most times dozens of people. You're not Michael Corleone here, you're a butcher.

This I accepted in San Andreas, Vice City and Saint's Row because the inherent goofiness of both settings.

but again, you're ignoring the fact that he was strongarmed into that position. he had no choice but to do the heist, and the cops were trying to kill him. yes, he did monsterous things, but not because he chose to. if you were forced into that position, you'd have to kill cops too. for a real world example, look up the pizza guy bank robber with the bomb collar.

 

[TAdamson]

but again, you're ignoring the fact that he was strongarmed into that position.

No he's not. There is no reason that Niko shouldn't take the thousands of dollars that the game implies that he has at that point and leave. There is no reason that Niko shouldn't drop everything after the first time he's forced to kill a bunch of people.

He keeps killing, willingly walking into situations that may result in killing, and complaining about all the killing that he had to do in the war while driving to an apartment to pick up some cocaine in a transaction that will inevitably result in him killing.

Yes it's a game but it's still jarring playing what is obstinately a nice guy in cutscene who then has little to no compunction about murdering a bunch of guys at the behest of a steroid abusing douchebag who he's just met.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

but again, you're ignoring the fact that he was strongarmed into that position.

No he's not. There is no reason that Niko shouldn't take the thousands of dollars that the game implies that he has at that point and leave. There is no reason that Niko shouldn't drop everything after the first time he's forced to kill a bunch of people.

He keeps killing, willingly walking into situations that may result in killing, and complaining about all the killing that he had to do in the war while driving to an apartment to pick up some cocaine in a transaction that will inevitably result in him killing.

Yes it's a game but it's still jarring playing what is obstinately a nice guy in cutscene who then has little to no compunction about murdering a bunch of guys at the behest of a steroid abusing douchebag who he's just met.

i guess it's just a matter of our perceptions. i went back through and did a quick brush up on the insanely convoluted story of gta 4, and i see him as a victim of circumstance more than anything. he was backed into a corner in a foreign land surrounded by the same crazy shit he was trying to get away from, making his use of those skills he'd acquired seem less drastic. as for the thousands of dollars, that is subjective to the player, not objective to the story.

 

[TAdamson]

as for the thousands of dollars, that is subjective to the player, not objective to the story.

Which is Ludo-Narrative dissonance.

 

[Azahul]

Was I the only one thinking about the Walking Dead throughout this? A game that actually gets that for the moments of violence and tension, you need to have long periods in which you explore characters, their motivations and desires, and all that good stuff. At least, that's what you need if you want your game to have a good shot at emotional impact. Otherwise you're just going to have to cross your fingers and pray players latch on emotionally in the thirty seconds of screentime the NPC that is about to die gets.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Perhaps they are going about it the wrong way. When you have a franchise like Aliens, maybe you should go the shallow generic fps path and make it a standard shooter, eliminate the story or any pretext of it altogether. This to me was why in the AvP games, the Predator levels were the best; Hunt, Kill, Decapitate, Time for a cold one.

The beautiful thing about games is, and this seems to be a pretty common thing that a lot of game devs haven't seem to caught on to yet, is that there are no time constraints like with movies. You don't need to hamfist in characters or lengthy cinematics to make people emotionally invested, you have the greatest resource available; Time. Start using it.

 

[loa]

Yes quite.
Whenever good olde Angry Joe mentions how aliens is his favourite movie because of the "badass colonial marines" and how he can't wait to see a game about them, my face greets my palm at nigh terminal velocities.
An aliens game about marines being badasses and continuing to be badasses misses the entire point of why the movie worked the way it did.

It is saddening to see that the translation of the movie to a game seems to inevitably lead to halo in dark corridors.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

I've been thinking that the best Alien game would be something like a combination of Slender and Space Hulk. The idea of an abomination of a creature stalking you as you're trapped in some kind of dank metal box floating through space... that is inherently exciting a premise, and I suppose it's what made Dead Space so tense. And really, that's all an Aliens game has to be unique anymore - after games like Halo, F.E.A.R., Gears of War, Quake 4, DOOM 3... the "Colonial Marines" bent has been done better.

This is why, I've decided, that despite the Xenomorphs vs Colonial Marines stuff in the AVP games, that they're still so popular and that they work as Aliens games. The Predator is a scary, stalking, invisible horror that is constantly on your back, and that perhaps fills in the void left by the Xenos becoming slightly more expendable. Though, hell, even Rebellion's Aliens vs Predator had pretty great Xenomorph representation - much better than in Colonial Marines, without a doubt.

This is an article I whoreheartedly agree with - as per usual, Shamus! I miss you Shamus. Please don't ever leave us again

 

[Paradoxrifts]

I would have dropped the single-player campaign from Aliens : Colonial Marines in its entirety, and replaced it with the second movie of the franchise before making it abundantly clear to fans of the franchise that I was in no way preventing a single-player game set in the alien franchise from being made by anyone else. Provided that it didn't support multiplayer, of course. No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. Same principle applies here. Games that are equally good playing solo as they are playing online are the exceptional exceptions, not the rule.

 

[ben---neb]

This is something Assassins Creed II almost did very well...or at least, it did it well at first when you had to run around doing tasks for your family, at the time it felt a little boring but it made me care about Ezio's mother and sister in a way that I haven't before.

Then the game wastes it when you get to Mario's estate because you cease to interact with your mother or sister at all so you lose your feelings for them. If the game had thrown in periodic quests for them both then it would have helped keep me caring!

 

[Dastardly]

Aliens Isn't About Shooting Aliens

Capturing a good Aliens game seems like a task in and of itself, now we get some insight as to why that is the case.

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While you've got your mantra, they have their own: "If you find yourself doing something wrong, and it's not working, do it harder." Like if I stop eating at a restaurant because their burgers are god-awful, and their response is to give me twice as much beef for the same price.

 

[Wargamer]

This problem of storytelling in games is, I feel, shown very well in Resistance.

Fall of Man drops you right into the action with very little explanation. You know enough to say that this is an alternate universe, some kind of baddies called "Chimera" are around, and it's up to Team America to save the universe again. This would be a terrible plot where it not for the fact that the whole game is built around you having little to no understanding of what is truly going on. Every new revelation - be it about Chimeran technology, their reproductive cycle or just how screwed Britain is - draws you deeper into the mythos. Hale plays the silent protagonist role for the most party (the other characters even joke about how little he speaks) to help the player feel like it's them fighting for survival.
Finally, the 'threat' builds quite slowly. Fall of Man plays its cards close to the chest, with Titans being thrown out rarely, the Stalkers being mostly relegated to vehicle sections after you first kill them on foot, and the really big things being a once or twice sighting right at the end. The game tells you a lot about Goliaths and Widowmakers and so on, yet keeps them out of sight so you never know what to expect until they're right on top of you. It's horror 101: the monster imagined is more terrible than the monster witnessed.

Then comes Resistance 2... and it gets everything wrong. Remember that Goliath you fought toward the end of Fall of Man? The thing so tough you had to steal a Chimeran battlemech to engage it? That's the first boss, and you'll spend the entire level killing it with nothing but a rocket launcher.
Well done, Insomniac. You've gone and blown your load within the first two minutes, and there's eight hours to go.
The game then proceeds to hammer home its idea of what modern gamers want; to be led around by the nose and have their ears raped by an unending string of "do this, do that, walk forward, turn left here, exposition! Exposition! Give me the controller and let me take over so you don't miss this really dramatic bit!"
Despite having more lines, Hale arguably has less character now. I honestly can't tell you a damn thing about him other than *spoiler alert* he goes all Chimeran and dies at the end. There's some piss-poor attempts to make us care about the characters halfway through by learning they had a family in a town that got wiped out, but that means nothing. We never met them, we'll never see them, and they are not mentioned again. This is not character development!
In conclusion, Resistance 2 seemed to believe that "plot" means lots of angry army men growling at one another as they march through a string of ever more stupid setpiece boss fights (the Leviathan seemed, in my recent replaying, a painfully dumb idea). Even as a fan of the series, I find it hard to care about this game's narrative.

But low and behold, Resistance 3 saves us. We see Capelli has a family now, and that all he wants is to live happily ever after with them. But of course he can't on account of the Chimera. The fact that Capelli refuses to go off and save the world is a nice touch as it makes him far more human than just having him set his jaw into the default Manly Scowl of Manliness and stomping off with gun in hand. Because we see his family, it means something when Capelli has nightmares about losing them. The fact that *again, spoilers* Capelli convinces himself they are in danger and puts the mission in jeopardy because of it feels like it's setting up some big 'drama' moment, but it never comes. It turns out Capelli's dream was just that, a dream. I liked that.
Then there's New York. I honestly do love that scene to bits. When Capelli staggers into a radio station and confesses to the world his belief that he is going to die, and how much he loved his family, I was really moved. His last line in particular: "Tell my wife I love her. Tell my son... I loved him." Right there, at that moment, you can see Capelli has accepted his own death.
To me, Resistance 3 seemed to get back to what makes a good story; a protagonist we can relate to, struggling for a goal we can understand. Saving the world is all well and good, but saving the people you love? That is so much better.

The TL;DR version is this: Big explosions and snatching the controller out of my hands do not make me care about a game. Show, don't tell, is the cardinal rule; less is more being the follow-up. The more we learn about the Chimera, the less frightening they are. The more we see them fail, the less frightening they are.

The Alien franchise has suffered the same way; it was frightening because it was unknown. Now, we know so much about the Xenomorphs it's getting really hard to come up with plausible reasons why they don't just nuke from orbit and save us six hours of sub-par gaming...

 

[Legion]

Let's say hypothetically that the game had:

- Decent graphics. I don't mean the best possible, because that doesn't matter, I mean good textures, lighting, physics and so on. So the game can replicate the visual style of the films well.

- A good soundtrack.

- Good mechanics. Proper motion trackers, weapons that resemble the films. Proper welding/blowtorch abilities to open cut doors (for which many should be available.

- Some real characters, with their own personalities. Ones it's possible to care about, with good voice acting.

I could quite easily spend the first hour or two of the game without any aliens, or shooting if they had the above and used them all well. If they had some decent pacing, some tension, good atmosphere and so on, it could be amazing.