Learn What's Fun: An Open Letter to Game Designers
I was playing Dead Space the other day when I came across a certain level. It was a part in level three or four where they had you sit in a chair behind a huge cannon and you shot at asteroids flying at you. After my tenth attempt at this, I believe I said aloud "Whoever thought that this was a good idea needs to be fired." That's when it hit me: I've played many games in which there's a level that I didn't like and I don't think anyone liked.
This happens in many games, the biggest, perhaps, being Resident Evil 4. While Resident Evil 4 is still one of my favorite games of all time, one thing that everyone encountered and everyone hated was Ashley. For those of you who haven't had the joy of playing Resident Evil 4, Ashley is the president's daughter and it's up to you to bring her to safety. She is unarmed and very dangerous, because if she dies, you fail and have to start wherever you were over again. She will sometimes stand behind you or, if you tell her to, inside of a trash can. Most of the time, however, she's standing right in front of a zombie. A zombie that will pick her up or more than likely kill her. Her only mean of defense is you and if you shoot her, she's injured. I have yet to mention her and have someone say, "I honestly believe that Ashley was an important addition to the Resident Evil universe and was completely necessary."
Escort quests are more of a hassle than fun, and fun is the only reason why people buy games. Raise your hands if you bought Grand Theft Auto 4 because you honestly wanted to take your cousin bowling. No one? I didn't think so. No matter how many people complain about them, developers still put escort quests in their games. There are many other ways you could have made your game longer. I'm not just trying to pick on escort quests, here. As I mentioned earlier, there are so many games with completely unnecessary sequences like the asteroid shooting level in Dead Space. There is no reason to have a boring, frustrating scene like that in any game, nonetheless my survival horror games. There is nothing more flow breaking and immersion destroying than a silly unneeded mini-game like that. Yet again, I bring back Resident Evil 4. Why would I want to take ten minutes out of my game to have some target practice? Once again, nothing against Resident Evil 4, because these were optional, but it did not belong in a game like that. People who like to play mini-games will buy games like Mario Party which is almost strictly mini-games. It does not belong in a third person survival horror game and it most certainly doesn't need to be necessary to move on in those games.
The escort quest isn't the only type of hated quest, however. There is also the dreded fetch quest, in which a character will ask you to go from your current position, find an item, then bring it back to the character that asked you to get it for them. These are very tedious and frustrating. Not because they are difficult, but because many fetch quests force you to walk a very long way to find something, and the thing that you have to find is predictably guarded by many people who you have to kill before you can recieve the item. After you defeat these enemies, you must take the item on it's long journey back to the person who asked for it. Many RPGs are guilty of this, but they can show up in any type of game. BioShock had many of these, and the only reason they're put in the game is to make it seem longer than it is. The developers run out of ideas to fill the ten hour plus time frame that it takes to beat the game. I can understand why this would be a good idea for the developers, but these types of quests are hardly accepted by the players. For some reason, these still exist.
Another nemisis of the gamer is the unskippable cutscene. Many of these are opening credits in which the games developer and publisher are shown. These can be quite annoying, especially when you are just trying to start up a quick game of Gears of War. You must sit through about a minute of the game telling you who made it, even though the game reminds you in as many places as possible such as the box or end credits. Although you're very proud of your game and we all know it, you don't have to force us to know that it's yours. Now, it is drilled into my brain that Gears of War is brought to you by Epic Games and Microsoft. While this is an effective way to make you remember what studio made which games, it is very annoying and sometimes it makes me less likely to want to play a game. I might want to play Crackdown and then remember that it takes about ten minutes to load up and then decide to play Mercenaries 2 instead. What's worse than the unskippable intro cutscene is the unskippable in-game cutscene where no matter if you have played the game and already know the plot points explained in the cutscene, you must watch them a second or even third time because the game just feels like making you watch it. There is absolutely no reason to make the in-game cutscenes unskippable. Possibly to prevent accidental cutscene skipping but in that case, you could just make it some sort of button combination that would prevent accidents but still make it possible to skip the cutscenes. These, and cutscenes that need to load are problems. An example is in Dead Rising where, in the beginning, it needs to lay down the basic plot points through cutscenes and while these are skippable, many of them have to load to be able to continue. This takes forever and since there are a bunch of cutscenes in a row, you'll end up sitting there pressing the start button waiting for the long string of cutscenes to load and then skip. If you thought that was as bad as it gets, it gets worse. The worst type of cutscenes are the ones that happen either before or after boss fights. Boss fights are specifically designed to make you die and make you die a lot. When a game has you watch a cutscene whenever you die, it takes up unnecessary time and space. Metal Gear Solid 2 is very guilty of this. You will die and then it will show you a cutscene that you will end up watching more than once. Yes, it's skippable but it has to load up and that takes time. Maybe making them show up the first time you die would be acceptable, but watching a ship explode and hearing "Snake? Do you read me Snake? SNAAAAKE!!!" gets really old after the fifth time you run into the invisible lasers that are all over the place.
Last but not least, I have to bash the quicktime events. If you don't know what a quicktime event is, it is possibly the worst addition to gaming of all time. Imagine you are playing a game and it then the game takes away your control and plays a cutscene. You're sitting back, possibly grabbing some Doritos, watching Chris Redfield shout witty insults at Albert Wesker when all of the sudden a big image of the B button appears on screen, suggesting that you press it and press it fast. You wipe the Dorito dust off of your hands, jump to the controler and mash the B button, but you're too late. Wesker probably just snapped your neck. That's not the worst part, though. You then have to watch the cutscene again and again until you hit the button fast enough and sometimes even have to press many combinations of buttons. You will most likely not make it on the first time through unless you are ready for it, yet these are near impossible to be ready for. What's worse is when it's randomly inserted into a game. Resident Evil is known for its quicktime events so when you enter a cutscene, you will most likely be ready for it. When it's in games like F.E.A.R. 2 which is not known for its quicktime events and Alma appears out of nowhere and you have to hit the B button a million times to get her away, chances are you won't be ready the first time. It was put in there for absolutely no reason at all and if it was removed, it wouldn't affect the outcome of the game at all. Except it possibly might be more fun. Another thing that has been bothering me about unneeded quicktime events are when they are use to hijack vehicles. Games that do this are Prototype and Mercenaries 2. The thing is, it's not a different quicktime event. It's the same exact one every time and it is extremely easy to do. Maybe if they just changed it up slightly, I wouldn't hate it as much. The thing is, hijacking vehilcles is a main point of each game. You have to hijack a whole lot of helicopters and tanks in both games and when the quicktime event sequence is the same exact thing every single time, it stops being fun, although it's not like they were fun in the first place.
I do believe that all of the things I pointed out have been mentioned many times before by other people and I was just trying to compile as much complaining as I could into one big article. The thing is, even though everyone hates them and it's been made fairly obvious to the game developers that the things I mentioned are unliked and need to stop being incorporated into good games. Even though I doubt a game developer will get his or her hands on this, if by some miracle it does, please take into consideration to not put these aspects into your games. I liked Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, Crackdown, Mercenaries 2, and all of the other games I mentioned, but these had little flaws that kept it from perfection. No one has ever liked these, and just by doing them more and more doesn't make people like them.
Once again, I'd like to see what the Escapist thinks about this article. What parts did you agree/disagree with? What do you think I left out? Feedback is greatly appreciated and feel free to correct my grammar. Sorry for the wall of text and once again ripping off the code from the news room.
