...the alternative subject heading could read "Boy, am I bitterly disappointed by We Happy Few". (Spoilers)
We all know it's a finicky task balancing gameplay with world building and exposition. A good game will cater for both ends of the spectrum; providing enough immediacy and challenge for those who are there just for the catharsis and payoff, and also crafting a world deep enough to reward the player who wants to stop and smell the roses. I would submit that some of the Halo games trod this line very well indeed.
What this builds, if done correctly, is immersion. The player knows that they're viewing the game world on a screen and interacting via a controller, but it's crafted in a way that invites a suspension of disbelief. Only then can the player feel invested in the events as they unfold - a litmus test could be whether the player avoids dying or just blase accepts it as a loss condition, or whether the player feels sorrow when a supporting character is injured or killed.
What I want to briefly rant about today though is when the opposite happens: when an otherwise well-crafted game conspires to present itself as the sum of its parts and not an iota more.
This is what I experienced playing We Happy Few recently. It started so promisingly, with a retro futuristic depiction of a dystopian 1960s Britain in an alternate history where the Axis won WW2 and a defeated Britain struggles to live with its broken collective national psyche. The game opens with a slice-of-life section set in the workplace of our protagonist, who works as a government censor. It's effective at setting up the tone and premise of the game while giving away very little of what will turn out to be the "core" gameplay.
A first minor disappointment sets in when you realise this superficially novel and innovative setting is then presented to us in the form of a very well-worn open-world sandbox, full of industry standard gimmicks and maguffins. There's really nothing in the exposition that establishes our white-collar protagonist character as particularly combative or adept at engineering, but quick as a flash the game has railroaded us into crafting, inventory management, and an unsophisticated hack-and-bash combat system. I found the most reliable way to kill enemies was to lob about a dozen glass bottles at them from the surely bulging pockets of my mod suit. The world is a hub with locked bridges as spokes. The NPCs ask you to fetch things and press buttons for them, because of course. This is stereotypical game territory; we can't have trivial diversions like exploration and experimentation getting in the way of the busywork, can we?
The bit that finally killed my will to persevere, though, was the incessant way the game kept tutorialising itself. In one settlement an NPC appears whose sole role in the game is to disinterestedly mouth-fart information at you that you should have already gleaned from crafting menus and loading screens: "outcast" NPCs will be hostile if they suspect you're part of the privileged status quo. How do you demonstrate this? Careful dialogue tree choices, perhaps? Gradually building trust through partisan actions, self-sacrifice, carefully hiding your 100lb stash of looted inventory items until the townspeople are convinced you're as wretched as they are? Nope. You make your suit a bit torn. To be precise, you navigate to the crafting screen, combine Proper Suit with Rock, and the game assures you you're now wearing Torn Suit. You don't see the process nor the finished result with your own eyes, because who cares about that kind of asset-intensive window dressing, the important thing is the player jumped through hoops to flick a switch from one binary state to another. Later on we encounter a situation where our character must act "normal" to avoid rousing suspicion among the law-abiding populace who live lives of hallucinogen-fuelled idyllic obedience. We're told in advance the exact gameplay actions that will cause the citizens to turn hostile - running, jumping, sneaking, looting and so on. We then have to pass an in-game quiz show testing our recall of the same information. And finally, when we're grudgingly allowed into the "Austin Powers meets Clockwork Orange" setting the game's promo material has been priming us for, the NPCs provide us with a running commentary of their in-game state. "Hey, why's that chap jumping! I'm starting to get suspicious of you! ...OK, perhaps you're not so bad. Wait, is his Joy level low?"
And that's where I gave up in exasperation and uninstalled the game. It's rare I allow myself to be strung along by a game for quite so long before realising that it's not going to deliver what it's advertising. All games are smoke and mirrors, I get that, but it's rare to see a game quite so eager to undermine itself - it's a bit like trying to enjoy an ostensibly serious and dramatic stage show where the actors keep pausing to ask the audience how they're enjoying it so far, and are the seats comfortable, and would anybody benefit from a brief recap of events so far? Just bloody get on with it!
OK, rant over. Did anybody else feel the same about We Happy Few, or does anybody have their own story where a game failed to see the wood for the trees and ultimately alienated the player?
We all know it's a finicky task balancing gameplay with world building and exposition. A good game will cater for both ends of the spectrum; providing enough immediacy and challenge for those who are there just for the catharsis and payoff, and also crafting a world deep enough to reward the player who wants to stop and smell the roses. I would submit that some of the Halo games trod this line very well indeed.
What this builds, if done correctly, is immersion. The player knows that they're viewing the game world on a screen and interacting via a controller, but it's crafted in a way that invites a suspension of disbelief. Only then can the player feel invested in the events as they unfold - a litmus test could be whether the player avoids dying or just blase accepts it as a loss condition, or whether the player feels sorrow when a supporting character is injured or killed.
What I want to briefly rant about today though is when the opposite happens: when an otherwise well-crafted game conspires to present itself as the sum of its parts and not an iota more.
This is what I experienced playing We Happy Few recently. It started so promisingly, with a retro futuristic depiction of a dystopian 1960s Britain in an alternate history where the Axis won WW2 and a defeated Britain struggles to live with its broken collective national psyche. The game opens with a slice-of-life section set in the workplace of our protagonist, who works as a government censor. It's effective at setting up the tone and premise of the game while giving away very little of what will turn out to be the "core" gameplay.
A first minor disappointment sets in when you realise this superficially novel and innovative setting is then presented to us in the form of a very well-worn open-world sandbox, full of industry standard gimmicks and maguffins. There's really nothing in the exposition that establishes our white-collar protagonist character as particularly combative or adept at engineering, but quick as a flash the game has railroaded us into crafting, inventory management, and an unsophisticated hack-and-bash combat system. I found the most reliable way to kill enemies was to lob about a dozen glass bottles at them from the surely bulging pockets of my mod suit. The world is a hub with locked bridges as spokes. The NPCs ask you to fetch things and press buttons for them, because of course. This is stereotypical game territory; we can't have trivial diversions like exploration and experimentation getting in the way of the busywork, can we?
The bit that finally killed my will to persevere, though, was the incessant way the game kept tutorialising itself. In one settlement an NPC appears whose sole role in the game is to disinterestedly mouth-fart information at you that you should have already gleaned from crafting menus and loading screens: "outcast" NPCs will be hostile if they suspect you're part of the privileged status quo. How do you demonstrate this? Careful dialogue tree choices, perhaps? Gradually building trust through partisan actions, self-sacrifice, carefully hiding your 100lb stash of looted inventory items until the townspeople are convinced you're as wretched as they are? Nope. You make your suit a bit torn. To be precise, you navigate to the crafting screen, combine Proper Suit with Rock, and the game assures you you're now wearing Torn Suit. You don't see the process nor the finished result with your own eyes, because who cares about that kind of asset-intensive window dressing, the important thing is the player jumped through hoops to flick a switch from one binary state to another. Later on we encounter a situation where our character must act "normal" to avoid rousing suspicion among the law-abiding populace who live lives of hallucinogen-fuelled idyllic obedience. We're told in advance the exact gameplay actions that will cause the citizens to turn hostile - running, jumping, sneaking, looting and so on. We then have to pass an in-game quiz show testing our recall of the same information. And finally, when we're grudgingly allowed into the "Austin Powers meets Clockwork Orange" setting the game's promo material has been priming us for, the NPCs provide us with a running commentary of their in-game state. "Hey, why's that chap jumping! I'm starting to get suspicious of you! ...OK, perhaps you're not so bad. Wait, is his Joy level low?"
And that's where I gave up in exasperation and uninstalled the game. It's rare I allow myself to be strung along by a game for quite so long before realising that it's not going to deliver what it's advertising. All games are smoke and mirrors, I get that, but it's rare to see a game quite so eager to undermine itself - it's a bit like trying to enjoy an ostensibly serious and dramatic stage show where the actors keep pausing to ask the audience how they're enjoying it so far, and are the seats comfortable, and would anybody benefit from a brief recap of events so far? Just bloody get on with it!
OK, rant over. Did anybody else feel the same about We Happy Few, or does anybody have their own story where a game failed to see the wood for the trees and ultimately alienated the player?
