Ranting since 2009

The other night I went to sleep thinking about how disappointed I was with the poor port of WH40K Space Marine for PC, able to make me feel it was 2005 once again. This got somewhat mixed with my feelings towards the new X-Com and Syndicate Wars games, and after the initial irate mumbling, some clever thoughts found some empty space on my mind.

Sadly I didn’t write them down at that point, so you’ll have to read the aftersleep-digested edition.

So, the thing is now X-Com and Syndicate Wars, games that were almost their own genre, are going to get an “update”; this means they are going to be turned into FPS games. After watching some gameplay videos of X-Com and crying, knowing that my childhood was also going to be raped through a new Syndicate game, I couldn’t but cry a little. I imagine someone out there sitting down with some other people saying something like this:

“There’s this old game that was awesome. We can clone that top-selling game, change the models and story to match the old game’s style just enough, and get both all those players playing the new game and the old one!”

And then, instead of getting his face bitch-slapped as the situation required, that guy got some millions and was asked to turn them into profits through that awesome idea. Now, I do not think gamers are an “infinite” resource, especially in these times. I myself can’t just buy EVERY game anymore, and I’m starting to get picky. Maybe being mistreated for years by some publishers has something to do with it as well. So, based only in my own feelings towards the current non-independent market, and from a PC perspective (even though I have a PS3 with quite a library of games), I created these… diagrams, to help me explain myself:

FPS days are nowadays what strategy games were on PC 15 years ago (what FPS games were in PC 10 years ago, heh), and what platformers were in the 8bit and 16bit eras. They are just “the thing”. Every single month of the year you get a new FPS for your game console, and maybe a port for PC. Many of those ports don’t even bother adapting themselves at all to, you know, a mouse and a keyboard, or hardware from this century, so PC gamers get each month, or couple of months, a bland game with mediocre graphics and gameplay, a huge reticle, an Xbox360 gamepad in the settings menu. The game will run flawlessly, mostly because the graphics options are limited to screen resolution, gamma and v-sync. Hell, the player might even get the option to center the image on the screen. Remember last time you needed to do that? It was right before you bought your first TFT screen, when Half Life 2 was announced. It will come to your mind, eventually.

Anyway, these players shouldn’t be particularly upset. I mean, we’ve been saying it for years. Graphics aren’t everything, and great graphics don’t make games. So, what do we get instead of top-notch visual quality? A great story.

A great story.

Really? Point-and-click adventure games used to have great stories, yet they were always a niche, even on their golden age. I mean, Secret of Monkey Island IS a great game… but, you know, it could have been a novel, a TV show or a comic. Yes, it was fun to play, yet once you had actually played through it… well, it was done. You could play it again for the laughs, but it wasn’t really a challenge anymore. Curse of Monkey Island had the “MegaMonkey” difficulty setting, that allowed a second playthrough exposing the player to new challenges, but it doesn’t really make it last MUCH longer. Now, other games like Blade Runner tried a much more open approach, having a ton of endings and multiple ways to handle each situation, and various exclusive conversation paths with each character. And… yes, these games have made it to the “hall of fame” of games.

Now, do you remember Adventure in Serenia? Chances are you don’t, even though Roberta Williams put her name under the title. Was the story good? Yeah, it was! Was the game good? As much as any Zork-clone. This one had images (the first one including them). What does that mean? Well, it sucked. It sucked back then as much as it sucks now. Typing every single action isn’t fun. It was the only way it could be done back then, though, so, that’s what you HAD to do. But anyone playing the game in 1984 (just 2 years after it came out) would have had the same feeling if they had also played the first King’s Quest. The latter was much more of a GAME than Adventure in Serenia. Now, story-wise, probably Adventure in Serenia was much better (a matter of tastes, I guess).

What made the games different? Graphics? Not exactly. Gameplay is the word. Not having to type every single action and read every single reaction was probably a plus for King’s Quest. A few years later, people were playing Super Mario Bros on the NES all over the world. Let’s recall the story in that game: a huge turtle-shelled lizard kidnapped a princess from her castle in a magical kingdom inhabited by the mushroom people and an Italian plumber travels to that magic place to rescue her by stomping on every single enemy crossing his path.

What this game lacked in the story section, it certainly compensated with gameplay. Fast forward to the latest games of the same franchise, and you’ll find that the story hasn’t developed much further on later versions. Yes, there are RPGs that do show a more intricate arc with characters that are developed over the course of the story, but those products are… well, a different franchise, you could say, the same way you wouldn’t say Super Mario Kart fills the gap between Super Mario World and Super Mario 64.

Back to X-Com and Syndicate. Both of those games’ story sucked, period.

OK, I’ll explain myself. In X-Com you got to know about the aliens that were landing on the planet through brief texts when investigating their corpses. Or by torturing them, if you could/cared to capture them alive. Syndicate had a bit more of a complex story with mind-controlling hegemonic corporations; although this dystopia is developed with a richer detail during the game, a movie made out of it just by what you actually played in the game would be a movie you wouldn’t want to see. Why? Because it’s pretty much “a setting” for stuff to happen. And the game wasn’t about developing that story. If you were to tell anybody about what Syndicate Wars was, would you say “it’s a dystopia about corporations controlling people and the ironic juxtaposition presented when those rebelling against the establishment form a sect pursuing the exact same goals”? Is that what you see here?

I couldn’t hear the irony of the juxtaposition. Too many explosions, machineguns and screams. I guess that made the game bad, didn’t it? No! It did it awesome! Same with X-Com. The first X-Com has yet to be dethroned as the best tactical turn-based strategy game. I guess that’s why they are not even trying, and instead, they are giving us Brothers in Arms with UFOs in American suburbs. But Hell, it’s going to have a story so great… so great it’s already pissing me off.

The best games didn’t need of particularly great stories. They were good, because they were fun. And a
lmost all of them were fun because of the gameplay itself. And those games offered something in a way that wasn’t offered before, or at least, tried to actually improve it. Half Life is a better game than Doom. It’s not just the graphics, but the way it started a new way of doing things and storytelling; a way that has been sadly prostituted over time, bringing us these “theme-park” rail-shooters were the world is just a great hallway. If you were playing Fallout, and you had a visit, you wouldn’t be asked “hey, is that X-Com?”. If you were playing Syndicate, nobody would ask you if it was a new Doom.

But now it’s like there are only three games. Modern Warfare, God of War, and “the rest”. And after Space Marine I’m already glad we don’t get more ports of the second. In a couple of years, you’ll look at a screenshot from Bodycount and another one from Homefront, and you’ll frown, trying to guess which is what.

Then, why is this done? If making horrible FPS games is such a bad idea, why do we get so many of them? Well… I guess it’s because enough people buy them, and it’s easy to do. I mean, it’s not like we’ve gone too far from normal mapping; tesselation and depth of field effects don’t really require a lot more effort, and considering games nowadays are created with the limitations of the 360 in mind (256MB of RAM, ffs), making a game that just has a character walking against hordes of enemies for different reasons doesn’t require that much of an investment. It’s like “playing safe”. I just wonder if that people deciding these things know what they are doing. Not so long ago, every single MMO was going to be the WoW-killer. WoW is still there, so I guess it didn’t work, probably because it often involved using the exact same mechanics in an unpolished way, offering nothing really new to WoW players. Kind of the same we’re getting with FPS games.

And it makes me sad. It makes me sad to think that there are probably many, many game studios out there, with great projects that can’t be achieved, just because they fall outside the self-imposed boundaries. Luckily for everybody, as I’ve said many times, making games is easier than ever. Yet, not that long ago, Microprose thought Enemy Unknown deserved to be published as much as Civilization II. Crazy, huh?