To Thine Own Game Be True

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I remember reading Fight Club and thinking, “There’s nobody I can think of who could better do this than [David] Fincher.” It’s like it was made for him. It’s the kind of text married to someone of his talents.

-Edward Norton, AV Club Interview

One of the greatest struggles of the artist is to discover one’s areas of expertise and come to terms with one’s limitations. This can be brutal and occasionally heartbreaking: One can’t help but feel sympathy for the person who dreams of being a painter only to discover they are colorblind, or the singer-songwriter who is hopelessly tone-deaf. It can also be empowering; discovering that one has a talent for the thing they most love to do is an awe-inspiring revelation.

In an interview with us last month, Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany said that they avoid overt narratives as a company because, “None of us are professional storytellers nor have much experience in it, so why would we try and compete with games that hire extremely established writers?” A statement of this kind may seem obvious to many, but artistry is never so simple. Artistic creation is the stuff of dreams. Art tells us that we can do whatever we want to do. Kellee Santiago’s statement, to me, is both encouraging and humbling.

If This Is an Open World, Why Are All the Doors Closed?

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I was hunting down another surveillance device on the side of a building in inFamous, struggling with the awkward platforming controls. This was the third building covered in these blinking red devices, and I had to track down each one and get right next to it to deactivate it. I was stuck, once again, jumping up to grab one ledge and accidentally clinging to another, when it occurred to me just how little open world games bring to the table. The formula for creating an open world game seems to be this: Take a normal, linear story, separate it into missions, and require the player to do a lot of travelling to get to each mission. Then throw in lots of dull, repetitive side missions, hidden objects, collectibles, etc. And don’t worry too much about sloppy, over-complicated control schemes or glitches; those have come to be expected in open worlds.

At their very best, open world games offer one of two things not present in most linear video games: the ability to do almost anything and push the boundaries of the world, and a sense of discovery and wonder. Grand Theft Auto, as a series, became famous largely for the former. There is a linear story in each Grand Theft Auto game, but the appeal for many is the ability to do as one pleases. You want to spend all your time hitting on women and eating hot dogs? Fine. Want to be involved in high speed chases with the cops? Sure. Want to see how far you can jump on a motorcycle? Go for it. Will you obey traffic laws, or drive recklessly? Do you want to travel by bicycle or jet pack? This is a valid and useful approach to the open world game, because the openness is about options over environment. Grand Theft Auto presents a playground.

The other approach to the open world relies more fully on the aspect of exploration. This school of thought is based on the appeal of discovering new and interesting places, and relies more thoroughly on visual and narrative design. An excellent example of this school of open world design is Fallout 3, which had several completely optional locations with compelling, insulated stories that outstripped the cliché overarching plot of the game. Some of the vaults that dotted the landscape, for example, oozed with tension, intrigue, and atmosphere. And if the player didn’t go out exploring, they would never be seen. Brütal Legend managed to make exploration exciting simply by virtue of its creative environmental design. Every heavy metal landscape had some bizarre new piece of architecture or natural growth worthy of an album cover. Fallout 3 and Brütal Legend show their seams elsewhere, but they each get a few things right; it’s clear, at least, why the creators wanted to set their games in open worlds.

If an open world game doesn’t provide one of these two benefits, why bother making it an open world game at all? Playing inFamous, I continue to wish that the same plot had been told in a completely linear fashion. Taking breaks in the action to replay the same mission types reduced the enjoyment I was getting from the game. Just because a mission is optional is no excuse to make it boring. Assassin’s Creed was criticized for the same problem; there just weren’t enough different things to do to keep the experience consistently entertaining. If inFamous were a more linear, plot-driven game, there wouldn’t be so much junk on the periphery, spoiling an otherwise fun and exciting premise.

Also, for some reason open world games have become synonymous with poor controls and technical difficulties. It is difficult to get Cole, the lead in inFamous, to jump and land just where you want him to or cling to the right part of the building. The cover mechanic in Grand Theft Auto IV was obtuse and the car controls were needlessly difficult to master. The first Assassin’s Creed gave the player a huge world to explore and the graceful, simple controls to explore it, and then killed the player if they accidentally took a dip in any body of water. And almost every open world game ever made has had problems with texture loading, slowdown, screen tearing, and crashing. What rule determined that having a more complicated world gave the game designers license to make a less functional one that’s harder to interact with?

I can accept technical issues; I prefer a well-polished game, but I’ll take a fun one with a few hiccups. A strange control system is less forgivable, but I’ll learn it if the game makes up for it in other ways. The real tragedy of open world games is that they are still designed just like linear experiences. There is still a main storyline that the player is meant to traverse, at the end of which something climactic happens and the credits roll. Maybe the game lets the player continue after the end credits, but the narrative is finished.

A truly open world would let the player set their own goal. Maybe they want to end crime in the city, once and for all, by working their way through the crime families and striking fear into street criminals. Maybe they want to be adventurers and thrill seekers, and run a business to finance their every whim. Maybe they just want to find the right person to love, and make sure that they are both safe from the forces allied against them. Adding every option imaginable is an impossible task, but more available storylines will result in a more open world. The credits should never roll on a real open world game. The game world should just present itself to the player and ask them how they want to change it.

Lay Waste to the Wasteland

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a lot of Borderlands and Brütal Legend. I’ve been having a blast with both, though they represent entirely different schools of game design. The difference lies in the ambitions of each product. Brütal Legend tries to do a lot with mixed results, while Borderlands is more focused and, as a result, better executed.

Borderlands only sets out to do a few things: it wants to be a good first-person shooter, it wants to provide a fun co-operative experience, and it wants to inspire a Diablo-esque fixation with collecting better loot and leveling up. It does all that, and looks great besides, with a visual style torn straight out of a comic book. My expectations were met almost perfectly. Even the story, what little there is of it, seems to fit the mood of the game: your character is a vault hunter, seeking lost riches and artifacts on an alien world, and you spend most of your time in the game gathering riches, weapons, and other treasures. You’re looking for treasure so you can find more treasure. That’s the game in a nutshell. The game becomes repetitive, but no more so than Diablo and its sequel. It’s a winning formula.

Brütal Legend has no such focus; it wants to do everything. Set in the ancient, mythical land of heavy metal, it starts as an action game, with an axe for melee attacks and a guitar calling down lightning and pyrotechnics on enemies. Combos are learned, weapon upgrades are purchased. Only then it’s a driving and shooting game, complete with speed boosts, ramps and on-board machine guns. This transitions into an open world exploration game, with plenty of collectibles to find. Sometimes it’s a rhythm game, where a quick Guitar Hero-style solo can be used to raise an ancient relic from the ground or literally melt the faces of your enemies. Then come the strategy elements, which range from ordering a few minions around on a mission to full-blown real-time strategy mayhem, complete with troop upgrades and resource management. These are called stage battles, and your resources are your fans, which rise up from the ground when they hear the presence of heavy metal.

It’s a very creative game, and it overflows with incredible moments. I discovered a guitar solo, for example, which summons a flaming zeppelin from the sky to crash and explode wherever you’re standing. That’s just as awesome as it sounds. The environments are as face-melting as the solos, from walls of amps set into craggy cliff faces to mountains of bone and ice, with trees made of hot rod tailpipes. And the writing is fantastic in its variety as well: the game is inspiring, sad, dramatic and hilarious, all in turn or occasionally at once.

In playing both Brütal Legend and Borderlands, I found myself wondering which school of thought resulted in a better game. Borderlands is a much more polished experience, to be sure, and some of the different gameplay modes in Brütal Legend fell a little flat, though I enjoyed the real-time strategy elements more than I expected to. Borderlands, however, offers very little in the way of variety. The game is played the same way throughout, there are only a few types of enemies, and the majority of the game takes place in cracked desert wastelands. Borderlands is a very satisfying game, but in many ways Brütal Legend is a more exciting one. The game is laced with madness, humor, and drama, and there are new and exciting ideas around every (flaming, metallic) corner. It may not succeed at everything it tries, but it does so many different things that it hardly matters. I’ve really been enjoying Borderlands, but I think that Brütal Legend has a lot more to offer. Borderlands will feel familiar, while Brütal Legend will surprise you. And looking back on the games I’ve loved, it’s those memorable, surprising moments that withstand the test of time.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jimmy Fallon

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I never much cared about Jimmy Fallon. He seems a nice enough guy, but he never stood out to me as a comedian. He got a late night show, and this meant nothing to me. (Well, I was amazed to find out that The Roots are his house band, since they're incredible.) But then something interesting happened. First, he had Kudo Tsunoda on the show to talk about Project Natal. Still, it seemed like a one time thing, and Natal seems like the sort of video game project that would have mainstream appeal.

On October 2, 2009, Jimmy Fallon won me over. Tim Schafer, the man behind Psychonauts and one of the people responsible for The Secret of Monkey Island, was one of the headline guests on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Not only did Fallon have such a great figure in video games on the show, he offered up a sort of mission statement for his show: that they want to treat video game releases like movie openings. He even likens Tim Schafer's name on the cover of Brütal Legend to saying that a movie is a Martin Scorsese film.

Consider me impressed. This is the sort of mainstream attention and respect that video games should be getting, especially as the industry grows to rival that of music and film. I'm glad to see Tim Schafer on a late night show, and I'm grateful to Jimmy Fallon and his team for having the presence of mind to put him there. Who would have guessed that the star of Taxi would one day have his finger so firmly on the pulse of the modern audience?