In fact, if you listen to the developer commentary on HL2 Ep2 right when you exit the mine after *spoiler* you heal Alyx, they talk about how they worked towards nudging the player in the right direction without actually taking over the game or with a massive pop-up message telling you to turn around.Irridium said:
Extra Punctuation: The Rise of Rail Roading
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I never had a problem with linearity as long as it was fun, but recently I've been finding myself a bit more reluctant to just be going through the motions and wanting more freedom. I've been moving away from first/third person shooters this summer so as to not get burnt out lol it's been a fun summer (sandbox games with free roam, rpgs and etc) so I think I'm ready for Gears 3 and Halo CE A again.
I'm seeing a AAA developer crash in the near future. Or if not a crash some of the support breaking and a good chunk of it coming crumbling down (though that may of already happened). I think this Summer of Arcade in particular has shown us that smaller games use their resources much much more effectively.
I think many AAA franchises have pretty much done everything they can do. Level capped if you will. Which is great for them, except they can't learn any new abilities or skills and just work exclusively on getting slightly better armor to just keep themselves busy...... Don't care what anyone says, leveling a character is so much more fun then end game shenanigans.
I think many AAA franchises have pretty much done everything they can do. Level capped if you will. Which is great for them, except they can't learn any new abilities or skills and just work exclusively on getting slightly better armor to just keep themselves busy...... Don't care what anyone says, leveling a character is so much more fun then end game shenanigans.
"What happened to the trust between player and designer? To the thrill a developer used to feel when players came up with a solution they didn't think of?"
It also used to work the other way...
At least I remember being shocked when I jumped up to the right off the second elevator in Super Mario Bros, aged 7. I was worried I somehow broke my shiny new game. Only to be very delighted to find the portals. It felt like me and Miyamoto became to share a secret.
He had put it there for the smart players, and I was proud to have found it. It made the game so much more fun, trying to find all those awesome secrets in every level of this game and all the next ones (particularily the first SNES game, wow, so much cool big ánd little things to discover.).
A game where you can't even fall down, as you mention it, is the anti-game from Hell...
It also used to work the other way...
At least I remember being shocked when I jumped up to the right off the second elevator in Super Mario Bros, aged 7. I was worried I somehow broke my shiny new game. Only to be very delighted to find the portals. It felt like me and Miyamoto became to share a secret.
He had put it there for the smart players, and I was proud to have found it. It made the game so much more fun, trying to find all those awesome secrets in every level of this game and all the next ones (particularily the first SNES game, wow, so much cool big ánd little things to discover.).
A game where you can't even fall down, as you mention it, is the anti-game from Hell...
I think it's not just video gaming that's competing with movies these days, but dirt cheap consumer electronics (that just can't seem to stop getting cheaper) coupled with digital distribution. Big-ass TVs and surround sound systems are far more affordable now than they've ever been, and the only real reason people bother to get off their asses to hit the theaters is because Hollywood can't seem to let go of a business model which is fast becoming antiquated. The means exist for the studios to completely bypass movie theaters entirely, yet they doggedly insist on sticking to the old ways.
RPG's are hurting me the most in this regard. Bethesda RPGs are fine, but BioWare-style RPGs, while enjoyable thanks to excellent writing and polish, are very guilty of putting the player in a straitjacket. I hate all the invisible, artificial walls, lack of jumping and static game worlds. The Witcher is especially bad, were countless times you are forced to walk all around a building because you are forbidden from walking up a slope or jumping down from a tiny ledge.GrizzlerBorno said:
To be fair however, this is not a new phenomenon. BioWare RPGs have always been rather static whereas Bethesda has thankfully followed the Ultima-way of dynamic, unrestricted worlds.
Nitpicks sorry. You praise Bioware games for being well polished, than criticize them for not having total freedom, even though in this one situation they are mutually exclusive. Just look at how piss-dreadful the animation looks in Gamebryo games.Tiamat666 said:
And then when that extreme freedom leads to the game being buggy (If I had a bottlecap for every radscorpion that attacked me from underneath the fucking ground mesh....) as was the case in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and most notably Fallout: New Vegas, everyone throws a fucking hissy fit and pans the game outright. Why take the risk say the Canadians and the Polish.
And besides, none of this has anything to do with story. I was just saying that open-ended RPGs can and DO still have awesome narratives.
Hah, you bought a 3DTV.
Next you'll say you're a big supporter of HDDVD and that the Kinect is totally the way of the future for games.
Next you'll say you're a big supporter of HDDVD and that the Kinect is totally the way of the future for games.
And this is exactly why I stubbornly defend games like Far Cry 2. It's hardly the perfect game, but it gives you the tools to create your own "action-movie" moments.
Fuck games that tailor each and every scene and force you to play them their way. I can't be bothered with them anymore.
Fuck games that tailor each and every scene and force you to play them their way. I can't be bothered with them anymore.
You know, when I hear Yahtzee talk about these linear FPS games that offer no freedom of choice whatsoever, I'm reminded of another kind of game: rail shooters. Those too are often about moving from one predetermined point to the next, shooting at the enemies as they appear, then moving on. The thing is, I've liked rail shooters in the past; you don't see many of them these days (as a result of the sad trend of eliminating video arcades from malls, thus depriving gamers of one of their few excuses to get out of the house and socialize with other gamers) but back when they were around, I enjoyed them, the House of The Dead series in particular. But the model used for rail shooters does NOT work with FPS's for two reasons: speed and control. In the words of an on-air personality on my favorite classic rock station, let me preach on it.
In a rail shooter, you are moving down a pre-determined path (sometimes with the occasional alternate route to be discovered by shooting a switch to lower a bridge or hitting an elevator button or something along those lines) at the game's pace. Being guided in this way means that you're on an active, adrenaline-fueled roller-coaster ride and you have to keep you eyes open and ready 'cause you never know when the next terrorist or alien or zombie or personal injury lawyer is going to pop up and rush at you begging for a bullet to the face. Rail shooter's realized that if you're going to hem the player into a predetermined path, you need to make sure the surprises keep coming and the player doesn't have time to get bored.
But when you put this style of gameplay into an FPS, you don't often get that same feeling of exciting tension. Instead, since the player is in control of their movement speed through the game, they can inch forward, get 1-2 enemies to spawn, then fall back so none of the rest do, shoot the few enemies that show up, then push on. The only way this gets broken up is if the game has ambush scenarios, and usually you can see these things coming a mile away from the layout of the terrain, walking into a big canyon-like area with scattered walls for cover, unless the entire level is designed like that.
Plus, rail shooters always give you a chance to hit the enemy that's about to attack you, if you're quick enough on the trigger and your aim is good. With a FPS, you could be concentrating on one enemy popping in and out of cover in front of you while his friend plinks at you from the side. That, to me, doesn't seem exciting, it's just annoying, like the kid you sat in front of in class that shot spit balls at the back of your head while you were busy trying to do the same to the one in front of you.
That brings me to the other problem: control. Now I don't mean controlling your character's movement this time, I mean the means by which you fight back. In modern FPS's, this is either the analog sticks on your controller or your mouse, the latter of which I find infinitely superior, as FPS's go. But even mouse shooting isn't as fast as the good old-fashioned light gun, weapon of choice for arcade gunslingers everywhere. The modern FPS isn't designed to be played with a light gun, and for good reason; how would you control movement? I suppose it's possible someone could develop something like a foot pedal that would stop and start movement and design a light gun so you'd turn in the direction the gun was pointed (Note to self, write suggestion to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo).
The problem is without the light gun, enemies can't be made too fast or the player won't have a chance of hitting them. It takes longer to move a mouse-controlled crosshair to line up on a target than it does to swing a light gun to the side and pull the trigger; not much perhaps but just enough that your average rail shooter enemy, with their typically-erratic lurching or their tendency to lunge at you from every ridiculous angle possible, would quickly tear apart someone trying to shoot them with a mouse.
Now, there's two ways to deal with this problem: either slow the enemies down so like a real life person, it takes them a moment to line up their sights on a moving target, or give players options besides trudging down a predetermined path that leads them straight to One Way Bullet Hail Alley. The former route is the better of the two if you must have an extremely restrictive linear playing area, unfortunately game developers often go too far, so much so that enemies are so incredibly dense they rarely make use of cover. This is why games like the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) are much better than crap like Clive Barker's Jericho. They're linear, but within the confines of a game like RtCW, there's still some room for creativity, whereas in games like Jericho, it's actually less entertaining to play than Nintendo's Duck Hunt.
In a rail shooter, you are moving down a pre-determined path (sometimes with the occasional alternate route to be discovered by shooting a switch to lower a bridge or hitting an elevator button or something along those lines) at the game's pace. Being guided in this way means that you're on an active, adrenaline-fueled roller-coaster ride and you have to keep you eyes open and ready 'cause you never know when the next terrorist or alien or zombie or personal injury lawyer is going to pop up and rush at you begging for a bullet to the face. Rail shooter's realized that if you're going to hem the player into a predetermined path, you need to make sure the surprises keep coming and the player doesn't have time to get bored.
But when you put this style of gameplay into an FPS, you don't often get that same feeling of exciting tension. Instead, since the player is in control of their movement speed through the game, they can inch forward, get 1-2 enemies to spawn, then fall back so none of the rest do, shoot the few enemies that show up, then push on. The only way this gets broken up is if the game has ambush scenarios, and usually you can see these things coming a mile away from the layout of the terrain, walking into a big canyon-like area with scattered walls for cover, unless the entire level is designed like that.
Plus, rail shooters always give you a chance to hit the enemy that's about to attack you, if you're quick enough on the trigger and your aim is good. With a FPS, you could be concentrating on one enemy popping in and out of cover in front of you while his friend plinks at you from the side. That, to me, doesn't seem exciting, it's just annoying, like the kid you sat in front of in class that shot spit balls at the back of your head while you were busy trying to do the same to the one in front of you.
That brings me to the other problem: control. Now I don't mean controlling your character's movement this time, I mean the means by which you fight back. In modern FPS's, this is either the analog sticks on your controller or your mouse, the latter of which I find infinitely superior, as FPS's go. But even mouse shooting isn't as fast as the good old-fashioned light gun, weapon of choice for arcade gunslingers everywhere. The modern FPS isn't designed to be played with a light gun, and for good reason; how would you control movement? I suppose it's possible someone could develop something like a foot pedal that would stop and start movement and design a light gun so you'd turn in the direction the gun was pointed (Note to self, write suggestion to Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo).
The problem is without the light gun, enemies can't be made too fast or the player won't have a chance of hitting them. It takes longer to move a mouse-controlled crosshair to line up on a target than it does to swing a light gun to the side and pull the trigger; not much perhaps but just enough that your average rail shooter enemy, with their typically-erratic lurching or their tendency to lunge at you from every ridiculous angle possible, would quickly tear apart someone trying to shoot them with a mouse.
Now, there's two ways to deal with this problem: either slow the enemies down so like a real life person, it takes them a moment to line up their sights on a moving target, or give players options besides trudging down a predetermined path that leads them straight to One Way Bullet Hail Alley. The former route is the better of the two if you must have an extremely restrictive linear playing area, unfortunately game developers often go too far, so much so that enemies are so incredibly dense they rarely make use of cover. This is why games like the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) are much better than crap like Clive Barker's Jericho. They're linear, but within the confines of a game like RtCW, there's still some room for creativity, whereas in games like Jericho, it's actually less entertaining to play than Nintendo's Duck Hunt.
While I can somewhat agree that games shouldn't completely hold you hand throughout the entire game, I also think a game shouldn't be too cryptic either. Sure, I like the occasional part in a game in which I had to figure something out for myself. And I do feel satisfaction for solving it.
But if a game gives you absolutely no direction or at least some idea about what you're supposed to be doing, it can be easy to get stuck on that particular part for quite some time. And that's when frustration kicks in.
I think a good example of an instance in a game where there's a balance between the two would be the Zombiebot King boss fight in Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. You have to kill a seemingly invincible boss before your friend, who is caged, reaches the end of a conveyor belt and is crushed by the grinders. As you pour bullets into the boss, he eventually tires out and leans over with his mouth hanging out. The game doesn't directly say so, but it's giving you a hint that you need to throw a grenade into his mouth to do actual damage to him. When that part is figured out, you've basically won the fight. Just rinse and repeat and watch out for the minions he spawns.
Not saying the entire game is like that though. There are definitely moments in that game in which you need to figure things out for yourself.
But if a game gives you absolutely no direction or at least some idea about what you're supposed to be doing, it can be easy to get stuck on that particular part for quite some time. And that's when frustration kicks in.
I think a good example of an instance in a game where there's a balance between the two would be the Zombiebot King boss fight in Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. You have to kill a seemingly invincible boss before your friend, who is caged, reaches the end of a conveyor belt and is crushed by the grinders. As you pour bullets into the boss, he eventually tires out and leans over with his mouth hanging out. The game doesn't directly say so, but it's giving you a hint that you need to throw a grenade into his mouth to do actual damage to him. When that part is figured out, you've basically won the fight. Just rinse and repeat and watch out for the minions he spawns.
Doesn't force feed you info? Lets you figure things out for yourself? Have you forgotten about this little scene?Irridium said:
Not saying the entire game is like that though. There are definitely moments in that game in which you need to figure things out for yourself.
Exactly. Have you seen the new movie trailer that starts with an image of an actual size image of a big-screen HDTV? It's a fraction of the size of the entire theater screen...annoyingly tiny. A bit ridiculous really. If my living room were the size of a movie theater, I'd understand...just ask the people sitting in the extreme front row if they preferred the HDTV sized display vs. the whole screen. With the right equipment, home entertainment surpasses the movie theater experience.Urh said:
Another great column Yahtzee. I like the humourless preschool teacher comparison, I think I might save it for later when I need it
Not saying you do this, but it's interesting how often people will praise Half Life 2 for it's freedom while condemning something like Halo when HL2 is actually far more linear than Combat Evolved. In fact Half Life 2 and all Valve games (not so much L4D) are highly regulated experiences and Valve constantly tries to control the experience. In Portal 2 if testers didn't look the right way for long enough they'd stick an arrow in the path or cut off possible alternate routes. Despite being a huge proponent of linearity, Half Life 2 usually get's a pass for having nostalgic features like a health bar, multiple guns, and decent pacing. Again, not saying you think that, I just knew it would come up.Irridium said:
Also, I know Yahtzee would never mention this, but the Metal Gear Solid games had lots of freedom despite the huge emphasis on cut scenes. MGS4 had ten hours of cut scenes and twenty hours of gameplay that could be played however you chose. Not necessarily as a sandbox, but with a freeflowing choice between stealth and action and levels big enough to choose your own route. Unfortunately it always gets criticized by people who parrot Yahtzee as being too much like a movie even though it's far from that compared to most other AAA games.
And for the record, my favorite game with sandbox elements is Wind Waker. Or maybe S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat.
Oh, I know. Half Life 2 is one of the most linear games ever. However, what sets it apart is that it does a great job at hiding the rails. Valve made it feel very... organic, I guess would be the best word to describe it. Even though you are on a forced path, it never really feels like it. It's especially jarring after playing shooters which don't seem to hide them well, and constantly try to shove you where they want you to be, while Half Life 2 lets you take your time, lets you move at your own pace.Hobonicus said:
It's why I love it so much at least. I know you didn't accuse me of liking it for silly reasons like the health bar/multiple guns, but I just wanted to expand upon my post in case anyone else does.
Though I wonder, why you consider someone liking a game with good pacing to be nostalgia?
I do know what you mean about it not feeling as rail-roaded as most of today's shooters, it does hide its linearity very well while feeling organic, which I guess is really what matters in the end.Irridium said:
And good pacing being nostalgic was just a dig at how modern games have horrible pacing
I mean, I myself feel nostalgia for a time when games could actually pace themselves properly.