RAGE and that status of RPG games

I'm about 8 hours into RAGE and I have to say that it's not only the best looking Xbox game yet. That's debatable of course, but no one reads this blog, so I'll just assume that I'm right.

Among the things that I absolutely love about this game there are still flagrant annoyances that bug me about every adventure game in the past couple years.

• I'm getting tired of pressing buttons to talk to people or advance conversations. Let's do a proximity thing that reads a little more into positions and facing people. If I turn to walk away, interrupt yourself and say something like, "...oh, okay. Guess we'll talk later." Or pull a gun and fire a warning shot if it's really a big deal. Let me know you mean business.
• If a game has multiple locales, stop repeating resources in each one. Parts, weapons, medicine/mechanics, games of chance need to be more organic. Not every town has a parts store or weapons dealer. Maybe a town only has a thrift or pawn shop. If a game is popular, show more/less people playing it every few hours. Those two guys aren't playing that game all damn day. I don't care how shitty the apocalypse is.
• Stop making side quests something I start and complete manually. Make something happen to me that I can choose to participate in naturally. I don't want to hit a button. I don't want to be singled out as responsible. If someone runs into me with their car, let me decide if I chase them down or not. That's why nothing ever gets done in GTA games anyway, am I right?
• Stop making me run back and forth. There has to be better ways to repeat use of gameplay areas. RAGE just sent me on a reverse course through a hospital path (and gave me an achievement for it!). You just admitted that you have no game play creativity by doing that. 
• If you're going to use someone like John Goodman and Claudia Black as a voice actor, use him in the entire game. I don't ever want to stop hearing him talk.

I love that RAGE made graphics one of it's highest priorities. I'm a little bothered by three disks, but I completely accept it for the payoff. I also really love the enemy A.I. and how they approach you. The muntants have multiple abilities from crawling fast to jumping off walls and monkey baring the ceilings to come and attack you. It's creepy and fantastic. The Authority soldiers aren't that smart, but I like their shields and willingness to toss grenades. 

If you liked playing Resident Evil or Dead Space for it's creepiness and enjoy Borderlands or Fallout for it's questing and item building, this game is a perfect mashup of the two "genres". I highly recommend it.

Medal of Honor Going "Modern Warfare"

What is it going to take to bring the lagging FPS war themed game Medal of Honor on a level platform with Call of Duty? They're going to try it.

Personally, I think the Infinity Ward has the perk/experience points system nailed down tight. If MoH goes anywhere near that territory, they'll be mocked for it. So what is CoD missing? Where is it lacking?

Multiplayer missions for starters. At least 4-player co-op campaign missions and I'll take no less. As a CoD veteran, I don't care about online and there is no way that MoH could improve what I think is wrong in CoD matches (glitching, lag, friends). They could put private chat back in, but that's really menial. I do want to go through the story mode of the game and play it with friends, keeping different saves based on who I play them with. Gears of War and Halo never got that right either.

What else? These games need vehicles, but they shouldn't bother unless they can do them right. CoD's perk system lets you shoot from a helicopter or AC130, but it's pretty unrealistic to open a box on the ground and be transported to a plane in an instant. But I loved CoD's challenges when one player is in a plane with a birds-eye-view of the field below, shooting things, directing the other players. That's awesome. It's good idea. Now put it into the real game.

I'm sure I'll think of more later, when I'm blowing up cars for a CoD challenge tonight.

Real Sand-Box Style Games

The problem with having a new born is that light sleepers sleep even lighter. And for me, half the reason I sleep light is that I can't turn my brain off when I want/need to (the other half of the reason is that I can't turn my ears off, so I hear everything). So tonight, I started thinking about "open ended" sand-box style games that really aren't and how they could be fixed and probably not nearly be as fun.

The Grand Theft Auto series is supposed to be the leader in open world gaming. You can do anything you want, whenever you want. But in reality, the game has confines that funel you toward an end. Sure, you can stop interacting with the other characters in the game and just drive around and do stunts and collect things, but that's hardly fun. Grand Theft Auto is like a really awesome movie game. You get back story, you work through the multiple storyline arcs and then come to the final conclusion/resolution. But what if the game had endings that might not ever happen or be so insurmountable that we realize that we need to keep playing to find an ending that suits us.

I feel like the main problem with games like this is voice acting. Trying to add production quality to video games like this ultimately holds them back. If you didn't have to write dialog for every situation, you could have even more situations and then not feel pressured to actually manifest them. GTA IV had hundreds of pages of script (closer to a thousand?). Why not proceedurally create the game using a system more built for the purpose: classic role playing games.

In an RPG like Dungons and Dragons, heros build characters based off of categories of statistics and a pool of experience points. By rolling dice, they give each attribute a value and base instances in the game off of them to determine the outcome. But what if every primary and secondary character in a video game had that.

Let's take GTA IV as an example. The game would give you the same backstory of imigrating illegally to America to meet your cousin and start a new life. Your back story as gangster determines your character statistics (i.e. you have a high percentage of shooting accuracy, high speed and strength and agility, etc). Everyone else in the game has statiscs that are created when you initiate a new game save. The problem here is figuring out every type of statistic you need to make the game have it's own story arcs (or not!). For instance, one of your cousin's new buddies could have a high probability to let you have a car from his dealership, but also have a high gambling probabilty. He could also suck at it. At the close of the local casino, anyone with unpaid debt has a problem and if one of them knew you, they might call you for help where you could, as a player in the game, decide whether or not to help and if "helping" includes using a gun.

By running the game off of percentages and character attributes and tying that with activities that already exist in the games (racing, gambling, flying planes, shooting pool, strip clubs), you would basically have a program that is acting as a the "dungeon master" and crafting an experience specifically for you, making sure that not too many instances happen at the same time, that as time moves along maybe things happen to more primary characters, and, with a high probability, one of a few huge event trees happens that lead you to a satisfying game end, not necessarily a story end. If we decided that our friend in the casino who's knee caps are about to be shot off, we could come to the rescue, kill the gangster owner and take over the place for ourselves. We win. But if we want more, we stay in the game, sell the casino and that tells the game we want to keep rolling the dice and see what comes up next.

How does that differ from GTA IV now? There are lots of small story arcs that we could leave the game anytime after succeeding, but we bought the game because we know there is a big finally ending that triggers the credits. If we keep playing, we eventually have to come to that ending. We could just try dating women in the game and play as a dating sim, but there is no final event there. In Fable, a game where you can get married and have kids, you get an experience and resolution, but it's based off of meeting requirements. Anyone who tries it and learns the rules will succeed. There's no chance or probability, leaving the "mission" on a single track. GTA, nor Fable, have stopping points where your telling the game that you want to continue and to keep generating instances of events of varying difficulty or probability of success.

Games like Dungons and Dragons have a players working in an enviornment where the dungon master has crafted an experience and feeds players a main story arc and choices. It's a relationship that requires the will to continue to meet goals predetermined by the dungeon master. Keep the character building of Dungeons and Dragons and use the abililty of a computer to generate days worth of content and you have yourself a truly open ended game where the content only stops if everyone the player can interact with dies off or moves out of town.

That all being said, I never said that a game like this would sell or be any good. It's 2:45 in the a.m. and "sand-box style" was the phrase that entered my head back around 1:30am.

Games Find a Way to Surprise

Every time you think you have a grip on what video games can be, will be, could ever be, something like this comes out. A first-person game where discovery is the engine that drives the play. A tech demo now...oh, what the future holds.


The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

From GameGirlAdvance.com

Xbox 360 / Suzuki Concept Car

I've seen lots of tv shows showing how concept cars are made for audio companies, but I've never seen one based off of a video game console.

I'm impressed with the dual Xboxen, the monitor mounted in the engine bay for the front driver and passenger and the rear projection system mounted in the ceiling to project out to the rear trunk screen.

2008 Video Game of My Year

Last year I declared Crackdown my game of the year.  This year, I'm naming Call of Duty 4 as my most enjoyed game of 2008.

I spent so many hours with that game that it would be hard to figure how many hours I put into it the single player and online modes. Sadly, the game does that for me. I believe I was 6-8 days range in the online alone. It was an almost nightly ritual for months on end and I was obsessed with the gameplay.

The Video Game Awards gave Grand Theft Auto 4 the game of the year. Call of Duty officially came out in late 2007, about the same time this year that Call of Duty: World at War released. I don't think it's fair to keep games out of awards based on their release date but by tracking users playing it (because every game system supports that now), but it's standard practice where industries award themselves.

Gamers, of course, didn't get to vote. Like always. It's a shame. The Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii all support that type of user feedback. We vote for things, enter contests and create content to share on consoles on almost a regular occurrence now. Why not let the people vote?

Game companies should do it right though. Nintendo should serve up a Game of the Year channel on the Wii so you can drop your Mii on any game that you've played in your library, not just the 5 nominees that Nintendo chooses. Microsoft should replace one of those stupid advertising tiles on their dashboard with the same thing. And Sony should put up some voting booths in that barren wasteland of Home.

On the Death of the Hero

The invention of 'lives' in gaming wasn't because video games had some morbid sense of accomplishment or denial. It was to make you spend quarters. Arcades being the first invention in electronic gaming had to have some way to keep you in the poor house, so 'lives' were created to give you three chances to resurrect yourself and complete your task.

But as games got older and moved away from spaceships and centipedes, people were introduced as the main characters and gave the meaning of 'life' a whole new purpose in games. They took on a resemblance of a cat's nine lives.

Man jumps. Falls in pit and dies. Tries again.

Before games were created, comics flourished as superheros wildly took over the imagination of children and adults everywhere. Virtually invincible heros that fight crime and save the world. Bullets riccochet. Punches glance. Danger is averted.

As the gaming picked up on the whole hero idea, gamers got to save princesses of imaginary worlds and stop evil from ruling the land. There were normal heroes; humans charged with super hero-like duties to save princesses from evil dinosaurs or returning the land from the creeping darkness of evil pigs. But there were also these superhero characters, still fighting their longtime battles from their comic book worlds, transported into digital form for us to experience with our two, human, mortal thumbs.

So why still have lives for these unbeatable heroes? Why should characters who span generations of our lives live any different in a video game.

To my knowledge, Superman Returns was the first game to address this issue. When it came out last November, Superman was indestructible. The mechanic of 'life' was removed. The paradigm was shifted. No matter what I did, nor what anyone else did, I was an indestructible superhero. Unbeatable. But then I realized what Superman Returns had done. It had gone and made things much more difficult.

Supes' objective was still the same: save the world. But this time, he had to save everyone else too. As destruction and evil rampaged across the map, Superman had to make sure that damage to the city and the lives of the people didn't reach epic proportions. Now, instead of a health meter for Superman, there's a health meter for the world.

As Halo 3 denies people everywhere the right to read books and go outdoors, again we are charged with the duty of controlling a hero. A super-human soldier. Not the virtually indestructible Superman we've come to know and love, but the protagonist of a story that inevitably will finish the fight and save humanity. Does dying as this character create a challenge is the game or does it take away from the experience we are meant to experience as the developers have intended?

Halo 3 is a short game, yet complex in it's story. Only on the easiest difficulty setting do most gamers get to experience the story as it was meant to be. But as gamers, we want a challenge. We want to be tested, yet we do not want to fail. We want to experience the hardships of our beloved Master Chief and still be protected by his armor and super abilities. We don't want to die.

So instead of creating immense levels and filling them with wave after wave of enemies armed to the teeth, is there some other way to test the mettle? To prove that I am capable of being a hero without suffering the mortal's death?

What Superman Returns did was just that. It created other factors to consider when fighting the generic enemy. You were faced with life altering changes that weren't meant for you, but for others. Choices that superheros make every day.

But maybe it's easier to program the destruction of your life than it is to create scenarios of lives to save or puzzles to solve or missions to complete in timely manners. With superhero games already having superhero-sized budgets, it could be too much to ask for every role playing game to have "next generation" ideas in gaming along with those "next generation" graphics and "next generation" prices.