Borderlands – The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

Much downloadable content seems to me to be somewhat conceptually broken. No no, I’m just overthinking it right? People like a game, they want more of it, and so the developers make some more and sell it out. Simple right? Hmm, I’m not convinced.

I don’t have a problem with developers offering more content to those who want it, after all they’re just a different scale of expansion pack really (my other misgivings aside). My problem largely stems from the type of game DLC is often being made for and the way it is integrated. Take the Zombie Island DLC for Borderlands: I enjoyed it, liked the areas and the new environments and had fun playing it, but the way it was integrated just seemed utterly incongruous and entirely at odds with the rest of the game.

First off is the geography. The DLC area is not actually relative to anywhere on the map, it’s a magical, far away land that can only be reached by means of fast transport. It could be anywhere and so might as well be an alternate plane of reality. This leads to a second problem which is as there is no real route to it the island only appears in the fast-transport list and right at the beginning of the game too. I presume these were intentional, designed to allow the gamer play their new DLC straight-away rather than locking it away in the latter stages of the game. Fair enough, I can understand that. Of course this leads on to another problem though: where as every other part of the game has fixed levels of difficulty requiring your character to be of roughly of a certain level, zombie island has to scale to allow almost any level of character to play through. A useful mechanic certainly, but your suspension of disbelief gets a little tested by the way zombie island missions simply scale along with you while the regular, mainland ones inexorably become trivial. The DLC missions are always at a fixed difficulty with relation to your current level and will scale even as you work through them (though playthrough one caps at lvl35). With the difficulty being immutable in this way you cannot simply grind up some more levels elsewhere and come back stronger nor can you skip side-missions in order to make things tougher, meaning that the difficulty must be set just right. Naturally in this fine balance the developers erred on the side of caution and as a result zombie island was rather easy, even with multiple players, and there was nothing you could do about it. Well, actually you could go there before level 10 to make it harder as that seems to be the minimum they’ll go, but this of course raises another issue, that of breaking the story. Being set after the end of the game it’s a touch incongruous to experience the DLC story before you’ve even left the Arid Badlands starting area. The solution to this is to make the story itself rather unrelated and ineffectual to the main plot, after all how critical can a piece of plot be if you can play it any point in the game without ruining the rest of it? Great. That’s exactly what I wanted.

It’s perfectly feasible to add more content to the game in a way that fits in with original title – alter the map slightly and put an exit by the coast for example. You have to reach that spot for your first visit, then obviously you can fast travel in from then on. This would solve many of the conceptual issues of difficulty and story placement and also just the arbitrary nature of warping to a new playground for an unrelated jaunt. Perhaps the story might need changing, but you would at least know what kind of time scale you had to play with. However, this of course comes at the sacrifice of not letting someone who has just paid for their DLC have access to it right away unless they have a character in roughly the right spot. This wouldn’t make for happy consumers.

So you’re faced with the choice between something that amounts to a short interlude which, due to its brevity, fails to re-create the magic of the original, or having to grind through hours and hours of the game again simply to access the small segment you’ve just paid for (which is again hamstrung by brevity), something you might have to repeat for each new pack. Neither is really an inviting prospect and it’s for this reason that I think this particular model is broken or at least needs a little thought.

Torchlight – Runic Games

Addiction is not a pretty thing – it’s life-consuming, it’s a burden and a distraction when you’re away from it. It keeps you awake at night either doing it or thinking about it. What’s even worse is when I have trouble explaining why I’m even addicted to it in the first place. Torchlight is one such addiction where I became hooked on what essentially seems to consist of clicking on stuff to see if anything good comes out. Sounds great huh? I’ve managed to kick the habit now, but I was main-lining that dirty stuff for quite some time. What was it that I was addicted to? Simple: loot. Why was I addicted to it? …not so simple.

The plot is almost non-existent and intentionally so as the designers didn’t want it to distract from the gameplay. I had little to no idea why I was in the dungeons and what quest I was actually doing, I was only aware that there was loot at the end of the quest. The game itself has extremely simple controls (though they gradually ramp up) that are basically just left-clicking on things. You don’t even control your movement directly, you just click where you want to go, click what you want to attack, click what you want to pick up and click what you want to sell. These almost childishly simple controls, a placeholder plot and a statistical barrage from the loot transpire to send you into a powerful loot-trance which can last for hours at a time.

To say the addiction is only about loot is probably inaccurate I suppose. There’s much to be said for incrementally levelling up your character, acquiring new skills or bumping up old ones, and mapping out where you’ll be spending the next points, but it’s important for there to be more skills than you can reasonably master without having so many as to be bewildering. Mix these thoroughly with graduated loot that’s only marginally better than what you currently have, being careful that it never quite satisfies all your needs, lightly sprinkle in some armour sets that are nigh-on impossible to finish, and round it off nicely with increasingly tough enemies to make your old loot redundant and you’ve got a time-honoured recipe for Gamer’s Crack.

Rarity is crucial of course – sorting through huge piles of items is made worthwhile by the rare-but-good shit. However, is sifting through mountains of worthless junk actually necessary though? What would happen if you were to simply remove the so-so generic loot leaving items to spawn infrequently but be consistently good? Certainly this would ease that tedious feeling of perpetually panning for gold, but I think really that the enjoyment of quality loot would suffer without mundane items to compare them to. It’s not only that the item is powerful that makes it highly prized, but that it’s superior and this bestows infrequent but beautiful moments: the widening of the eyes and the sharp intake of breath as you find a diamond in the rough. So unfortunately it would seem that using the loot-hoover and wearing your loot-goggles is an essential part of it all.

Overlapping mini-goals are what’s really at the core of this addiction though, in much the same way as a game like Civilisation I think. There’s always one piece of armour that you’re not satisfied with, one weapon that you really like but doesn’t quite cut it (or vice versa), one skill that you’d like to put just one more point in…These goals never align and resolve at the same time, as soon as you’ve managed to tick one off another rises to the surface, just when you think you can put it down you realise you can’t because you’ve very nearly achieved the next goal already, and as a result there’s a crucial absence of closure for the player. A careful balance of the toughness of enemies against the potency of weapons is a nice bonus to actually give the goals some urgency (for which you need to turn Torchlight up to Very Hard), and the net result of all these factors? Just… one… more… dungeon…

Portal & such like

What with games being so expensive we really need to get our money’s worth out of the pesky things! However, it’s becoming apparent to me that gamers seem distractedly preoccupied with quantity over quality, and that this fixation is somewhat divorced from considerations of price. Even if the ticket price is small, games are still not free from accusations of inadequate content. Much of the commentary surrounding 2007’s Portal was about how short it was, a finger that was also pointed at the recently released Braid (Portal came as part of the astonishingly cheap five-game Orange Box and Braid sold for £10). The low price of these games was apparently not justification enough for their brevity, and though many did recognise and appreciate the quality enough to feel that it made up the shortfall, some clearly still remained unsatisfied. Personally, I wondered whether the length of these cheaper games was even worth mentioning at all let alone justifying with reasons other than price – it seemed obvious to me they’d be short because they didn’t cost much, but clearly some people expected more. So is there some arbitrary quantity of game, regardless of cost, that must be provided? And is price only relevant to the quality alone?

At the other end of the spectrum from Portal and Braid, huge games like Fallout 3 get much praise for their sheer volume of content at normal retail price, so we are at least consistent if nothing else. Maybe it’s me that’s got it backwards, thinking of the price first then equating a length to it, rather than primarily thinking about how long I want a game to be then judging if it’s worth the price. However, an arbitrary expectation of length can have negative effects, and the story or gameplay can be dragged out to meet it. Some games simply don’t have the creative depth to fill that content requirement, and I’d much rather they just remove the filler and make is shorter. It might sound like a bit much to ask, but I’d like to see games being consistently good all the way through, even if that means being shorter than expected. It’s better to be left wanting more than it is to not make it all the way through.

So I guess it sounds like I’m advocating a system where things are priced according to the amount of content. If we’re so concerned about value for money then surely this would make sense as things could be priced accordingly? Perhaps, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be opening Pandora’s Box to find the next installment of Fallout costing twice as much as before – hey that’s because it’s huge kids! Neither would I be happy about paying full price for a two-minute game even if it was staggeringly amazing. I suppose games, like movies and books, will never escape the fact that they are consumed largely in order to pass the time in an agreeable manner – the more time they pass enjoyably the better. Books, however, vary a little in price depending on size, whereas films generally don’t even though they can vary in length relatively freely, though I’m not sure I ever hear film critics comment on it. Still, a few more pricing options for games wouldn’t hurt I don’t think, and it looks like this is happening too with the growth of downloadable games.

Really my point is that, regardless of the real-world practicalities and preferences, I feel the overbearing hunt for value is one of the long list of things that retards the progress of games to full maturity. The length should be cut for the game and not the other way around. Sure, a full price micro game would suck (and is an absurdly extreme example), but busting a gut churning out content to meet some arbitrary content-value proposition set by nerd-raging gamers will usually just make the game suffer in the long run. We shouldn’t ignore quantity at all, but it’d be nice if the focus shifted slightly over to quality a little more noticeably, and it would be extremely nice if we, the audience, could appreciate that quality without the need for caveats about brevity.

Understand Comics – Scott McCloud

Recently on Robert Ashley’s thoroughly marvelous A Life Well Wasted podcast, he mentioned Roger Ebert’s notion that games could not be considered a (high) art form as they don’t have sufficient authorial control. Varying levels of choice are inherent in games, one could theoretically go so far as to play Super Mario Bros. just by jumping up and down over and over again in one place, totally within the bounds of game’s rule-set. Of course they would not be playing ‘properly’ and as intended, but who’s to say they can’t do that? While gaming probably does have less control than other mediums, I found the discussion (and in fact most discussions about this subject) omitted the glaringly obvious fact that books, film and art also need to be consumed ‘properly’.

Take a book. Some people will scan the last page of a book before beginning reading, almost like a superstition, and in fact there’s nothing stopping them reading any page they like and in any order. Though it might sound absurd, this type of behavior is becoming more and more common; when surfing the internet we jump from hyperlink to hyperlink, mid-text and mid-video, consuming only bite-sized, non-sequential chunks of each. A film is in a similar quandary in terms of linear continuity, but also the viewing environment is way outside its control, yet still very important. Why should we create a proper environment on the creator’s behalf for ourselves to consume films in? So we can consume it properly and fully, to allow ourselves enjoy it. What if you only saw a painting out of the corner of your eye, what would you do? You’d go over to get a ‘proper’ look at it of course. My point is that we acknowledge expected ways to consume all these media in which the receiver has to play their part too, so why are games any different? Reading random pages or only watching half the film with the sound off might seem ridiculous or facetious, but no more so than just jumping up and down in the corner in Mario.

Comics have also struggled to be accepted as art, a plight which Scott McCloud’s awesome book Understanding Comics spends a while fighting. These days comics are much more readily permitted, after all they’re passive like books right? Wrong. McCloud devotes a whole chapter to the issue of ‘closure’ – the things that happen between the panels that we subconsciously fill in – revealing audience participation that we did not even realise happened. A comic author only presents to us static images with text and can merely imply what happens in the gaps; it’s the reader’s willing participation that gives the characters life between the panels. Film is somewhat more explicit than comics, but books I think are less explicit and require lots of audience participation. Jumping up and down on the spot will soon get boring, as does looking at just one corner of a painting. It’s easy to deliberately spoil your experience, so the author and audience must meet each other in the middle for real communication to occur.

So authorial control is not complete in any medium. Maybe that’s obvious. But what about the big intentional choices? Well, it then becomes the question of who is setting the level of this arbitrary threshold that games are failing to cross? It sounds to me very much like disqualifying noise metal from being music because it doesn’t have enough melody, something it’s not trying to have. Authorial control is indeed important in the arts, but it is not necessarily integral and defining, which reminds me of McCloud’s point about the frequent mistake of failing to separate the form from the content. Gaming is young and still has a long way to go before it matures and finds its own unique voice, but to renounce player choice is to discard one its greatest strengths. New art forms are not just different presentation methods of the same content; direct audience control is a real option gaming has over other mediums and it should embrace this difference in its continuing search for authenticity, rather than trying to perform other art forms – most commonly film – through a gaming lens.

It’s inevitable: it’s all going digital. How soon I’m not so sure, but that’s just a detail. However, legal and financial wrangling aside (a little hobby horse of mine), there is something I’m going to miss about having an object to hold and cherish. This really struck home the other night when I was playing Jonathan Blow’s Braid which recently came out on PC (long after its Xbox release). I fell for it in no time and felt it was so seamlessly created, such a complete package, that it just cried out to be lavishly wrapped up in a bespoke, tactile package. The reality is that it came in cold hard bits that for one reason or another I find much harder to cherish. There’s definitely a risk of sounding exactly like vinyl lovers do when talking about CDs and banging on about the artwork and that’s something I’m keen to avoid, so I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the way PC games used to be packaged because let’s face it they were packaged like crap. Needlessly huge and cumbersome boxes gave way to impersonal plastic DVD boxes with ever diminishing manuals; the closest we get to object fetish now is brushed aluminium ‘Steelbooks’ – which I suppose is nice but it seems like too little too late. When Braid whispered in my ear about reification, images came to mind of folded card embossed with patterns, a rainbow of matte colours, a notable absence of child-like, techno-hip, jumbo fonts yelling the title out and a distinct lack of bullet-pointed product feature list on the back.

I’m not a fanatic collector or rabid object fetishist, but I do wonder about my tastes. Am I outdated? Is this something I’ll grow out of? Or is holding things, touching things, something that humans won’t escape? Maybe it’s to do with ownership I suppose, in that we might sub-consciously equate being able to hold something as having the power and control over it and confirming our ownership of it – having the object there permanently is irrevocable proof. But I wonder if that attitude is the same for the next generation that has grown up with digital ‘possessions’ (for lack of a better word)? Do they still equate physical possession with ownership? Do they even think of ownership in the same way? The shift from vinyl to compact disc was a minor step, updating and modernising without really changing the premise, but the shift from hard-copy to digital is a whole new paradigm as you can’t hold it and it doesn’t even have a package! Thinking about it, I have become attached to certain box-less programs I use and that feels similarly warm and fuzzy. Maybe it’s even purer as I’m not swayed by fancy packaging. In any case, it will be interesting to look back in ten, twenty, thirty years and see how far we’ve come (or not as the case may be). Will the digital revolution be utter and complete or will we still continue to lovingly weigh ourselves down with objects?

Seven Minutes is a little gem of a game brought to my attention by the Gamers With Jobs. This article will spoil the game completely so seriously download and play it first. (Go on, it’s only seven minutes long!)

The premise is simple though bizarre: a giant, ethereal, disembodied, three-eyed head yells at you not to touch the blue fire. Naturally you touch it. The head then tells you that your world will end in the titular seven minutes and that you shouldn’t leave the room. Naturally you leave the room. What follows is a tricky but delightful 2D platform-game in which the Head continues to taunt you, reminding you that your journey is pointless as you’re going to die soon, and my, isn’t the time going fast?

After ignoring the head’s commands we find out it has been telling us the truth the whole time: at the end the head re-appears to tell us "There is nothing. NOTHING." And that’s it. Game over. We still know nothing about the seemingly omnipotent being and its quasi-nihilistic ravings, but strangely that’s ok. The charm is in how much is left to the imagination, the stylish design, tidy execution, how little time you have to get bored, and the quiet chuckle of the anti-climax.

But apparently that’s not the end. The creator tells us we’ve not beaten the game until we’ve seen the credits, which is achieved quite simply: don’t leave the room. After seven minutes the credits roll and that’s the real ending.

So, progressing through the game in the traditional manner presents you with no reward at the end; remaining inactive and doing nothing means you "win". But then why do we play games? To beat the game or to play the game? Before I stumbled across the real ending, I couldn’t help but think the Nothing ending isn’t really nothing. Really you get to hear the punch-line of the joke and you get to a little something from the disembodied head that’s analogous to a cut-scene. Or maybe that’s what they’re saying, that cut-scenes are really nothing and there never is any real reward at the end of games. Perhaps a defeat-ending more fitting with what seems to be the point of the game would simply be a dead end room – no visit from the head and no actual defeat-ending at all. But the real ending makes me think that’s not the creator’s intent.

The head spent the whole time telling me there was nothing at the end, yet I still ploughed on through. Did I not need a reward in order to enjoy the game, or was it because I assumed the head was lying? Certainly the aim is on a return play-through of a game, the ‘reward-ending’ is pretty much immaterial to me and it’s the play experience there for. Much the same is true of films I watch for a second time: I’m not watching to find out what happens again, I’m watching to enjoy the characters. A similar thought occurs when I reach a final boss that is too hard to be worth bothering with, the best bit of the game is already over  and I just quit after a couple of tries, why put myself through it? So I don’t really play games for cut-scenes or to beat them; I play games because the act of playing them is enjoyable in itself. In this case the real ending is ultimately hollow, and if I were to play Seven Minutes again I think I would surely be defeated, for obvious reasons.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is renowned for being a glorious, bug-ridden tangle that combines the best and worst that PC gaming has to offer. I picked up Clear Sky just a week after its EU release with high hopes, but the fact that it was already on patch 1.504 (containing sixty-eight fixes) was something of an eyebrow raiser and did not bode well.

Right from the load-up it was looking ropey; the publisher’s cut-scene and the main menu were displaced and only half visible. Next to crop up were mismatched scripting and events, which then developed into unachievable take and hold missions that ultimately ground the game’s faction war to a halt. On the plus side, I did find a supply box that would refresh its supply of rare ammo upon reloading the game, so naturally I staggered back to base laden with shooty-bits. Still, these issues were tolerable; it’s an incredibly ambitious game without the AAA budget and because they’ve maybe achieved that ambition in places I might be cutting it some slack, who knows. Nit-picking at minor technical details is easy, but I feel that ultimately you’ll spoil your own fun if you don’t look at these things in perspective. However, the more general problem is that bugs and exploits weaken the illusion, suspension of disbelief becomes harder, and the player begins to disengage. Simply put: they remind you that it’s just a game.

Unfortunately these issues were superseded by another somewhat more catastrophic bug about half-way through the game as all my saves began to brutally crash to desktop after only a couple of minutes, which – after attempting numerous fixes – caused me to shelve the game. I tried to play it again today for the first time in a couple months and it crashes instantly now, rather than after a couple minutes. I give up.

The flawed genius of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. poses some questions: is it a brilliant game that simply has some issues, or is the game genuinely bad due to the bugs? Can patches repair the damage or is the momentum lost? How long is reasonable for players have to wait till things are fixed? Should they have to wait at all? How bad must it be before a game is just plain broken? Is it just bad luck and everyone else is fine?

With the increasing complexity of modern games it’s no surprise at all that mistakes slip through the net; however, even if they are excusable their impact on your enjoyment is not diminished. After the initial frustration, the wait for patches saps your excitement. Even if patches fix the problems they often break saves in the process, and the prospect of playing through a long RPG again just to continue where you left off is onerous and the experience will simply not be as fresh. On the one hand I feel I ought to view games in separation from their unintended technical issues, but on the other hand why should we have to pay for the jarring frustration of bugs, even if the problems do get fixed eventually. While I could clearly see the potential in this case, I simply can’t ignore the bugs as they jaundiced the whole experience. The achievements and failures don’t smoothly average out to the middle as they exist on different planes, and the overall feeling I’m left with is confused frustration. The public criticism of buggy games by seemingly petulant gamers is often distasteful, but it may well be necessary; otherwise we may let developers off the hook too easily and may simply receive increasingly shoddy games. However, my suggestion would be to take the best of both worlds: be privately accommodating but publicly critical. Don’t ruin your fun, but strive for improvement. When the metaphorical insects get involved, no-one wins.