XboxSold.com BLOG

Jonatan Soderstrom, aka “cactus,” stole the show at last year’s Independent Games Summit with his surreal, multimedia presentation entitled “The Four-Hour Game Design.“

(Also: if you don’t know who cactus is, I’d suggest you spend the next week playing through every game he’s ever made. They’re alternately wacky, fun, surreal, irritating, totally independent experiences.)

This year, cactus delivered a talk about, in his words, “abusive design, and why you’d want to be mean to your players.”

Hit the jump for a summary of his talk.

Cactus’s talk opened with a seizure warning. Because that’s kind of how he rolls. Every bit of text he presented on screen hovered in front of a harsh, constantly rotating combination of black and white stripes that hurt my eyes after a few seconds of intense staring. Thematic coupling at its best.

So, why would you want to be mean to your players? According to Soderstrom, most games are really easy, and worrying about what your player may be feeling and if they feel comfortable can compromise your vision as a designer. It’s more fun to just be free, and do what you want to do without caring how the player will feel. You can also find new players if you do something unusual — a lot of people don’t like “normal” games.

Soderstrom went on to spend a great deal of time likening games to movies. Long story short: fantastic, surreal works can be found quite frequently in film (El Topo, the works of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick), but almost never in videogames. Soderstrom argued that David Lynch’s videogame equivalent might be Suda 51 given how trippy Killer 7 was, but No More Heroes was more MTV than Lynch.

Shadow of the Colossus borrowed a lot of narrative stuff from El Topo, but the visuals and style, Soderstrom argued, shared more in common with Studio Ghibli films. And these works are fine, but they aren’t pure, unique, unfiltered self-expression like David Lynch films are.

Soderstrom quoted John Holmstrom, referring to progressive rock: prog rock was for people who weren’t good at music, but had a need to express something personal. And that’s the idea behind abusing, or ignoring, your player.

But if you can’t program, what do you do? Soderstrom suggests using Klik-n’-play, or Game maker, which is what he uses. Nonprogrammers might not follow established rules of game design, and might create the kinds of games they’d personally like to see made. That’s what auteurs do, and can end up being really interesting.

Soderstrom used Matt Alridge’s La La Land series as a great example of player-abusive personal expression: the La La Land games have bad graphics and extremely limited interaction, eliciting a sort of “WTF” vibe from players, but to Soderstrom, the games prove that you can make games with limited interaction, but still have that interaction enhance the experience and make the game interesting.

“[Mark Essen, aka messhof] is kind of my idol,” Soderstrom continued. Messhof’s games are all extremely abusive, but extremely personal: they’re really hard, really simplistic, and really restrained. Cactus showed a video playthrough of Punishment before briefly touching on Flywrench (”I think it should have been nominated for an IGF award at one point”), and how the mechanics force you to play the game like a speedrunner. JPH Wachesky’s games were also singled out.

After highlighting his favorite abusive designers, Soderstrom moved into the question of how to make an abusive game. Starting with graphics, you can create blinking, rotating, or psychadelic patterns that make things really annoying for the player.

In terms of actual gameplay mechanics, you can create weird, inconsistent logic for your games that doesn’t seem to make immediate sense. As an example, Cactus showed a level from his game Mondo Medicals, where you’re in a maze and a bunch of arrows painted on the floor seem to direct you to the exit. By following the arrows, however, you end up going around in an infinite circle; to proceed, you need to ignore the arrows and go backwards, which results in the spontaneous appearance of a new door that couldn’t have physically existed there before. “You don’t really understand how it works,” he said, “but it’s a game and you don’t care.”

Weird logic allows you to create fresh puzzles really easily — the Mondo Medical level in question only took him an hour to make — and you can have a really varied game if you don’t force yourself to follow established rules.

To further illustrate this, Soderstrom played through a little bit of Psychosomnium. I don’t wanna bother saying which part, because you should really play Psychosomnium for yourself (doesn’t take long).

The problem with weird logic, Soderstrom admits, is that it might feel too random and arbitrary, and it’s really hard to adjust the difficulty of your puzzles if you’re just being random.

Alternately, you can use “insane difficulty” to keep your players surprised. I Wanna Be the Guy is singled out as an ideal example. A game like IWBTG is not completely unfair, but it forces the player to do things they’re unused to, as well as treating difficulty like a puzzle in and of itself. This ends up creating a sort of slapstick atmosphere, where constant death is a punchline. To prove his point, Cactus showed this video.

Soderstrom began to play another demo of a game I didn’t recognize before running out of time and wrapping up his talk with an unceremonious nod.

The 2010 Independent Games Summit opened today with a talk by Ron Carmel, one half of the 2DBoy team that created World of Goo.

Entitled, “Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System that Never Worked,” Carmel’s talk promised to elaborate on the details of the recently-announced Indie Fund, as well as the publishing environment than spawned it.

Hit the jump for my summary of the talk.

I really wish I’d had a camera at the talk — all of Carmel’s PowerPoint slides were gorgeously illustrated by David Hellman. “If you find yourself not listening to a word I say,” Carmel warned, “it’s his fault.”

Carmel opened by restating the title of tha talk and elaborating on exactly what “never worked” means. He likens the situation of game distribution to basic assumptions about software production twenty or thirty years ago: for a very, very long time, software engineering was treated like most other kinds of engineering, where you create a design doc and then just keep working to achieve what’s in the doc. It wasn’t until the 90’s that people began to truly accept that this sort of development structure is fundamentally incompatible with the iterative design that most software simply needs.

In much the same way, today’s major publishers treat digitally distributed games no differently than retail games. Publishers assume there’s no inherent difference in how these two types of games should be published, which creates problems for everyone.

Publishers give too much money to smaller, digitally-distributed games. A lot of these sorts of games don’t require big budgets, and when the inevitably fail to make a significant return on an oversized investment, it’s problematic for both the dev and the publisher.

Publishers have to take too much money in return from all of their other properties, because they have to offset the money they lost games that failed to make a return. They do this “not because they’re evil,” Carmel says, but because they are financially obligated to do so.

As a result of this format, devs sort of become like tenant farmers: while you’re working on the game you’re still paying out salaries and taking care of bills, and if you get to the end and your game isn’t a gigantic success, you’ve gotta find another publisher and get into the same flawed system all over again until you eventually can’t and have to shut down your business.

Ten to fifteen years ago, you really wanted a publishing deal, because your game simply had no way to make money if it wasn’t on a store shelf. Publishers would pour in a shitload of money for publishing and marketing, taking huge risks by doing so.

But that system is no longer as useful as it once was. It doesn’t work in regards to digitally distributed games. These games are much smaller, being produced by much smaller teams, creating a product that doesn’t need to be physically manufactured or transported, with budgets small enough that they don’t have to sell spectacularly well in order to break even.

Carmel then compared the amount of time it took for World of Goo to get accepted and placed on Steam, versus how much time it took to get the same game out there as a retail, Games for Windows product. For the retail version, it took 2DBoy two months of dealing with lawyers, then another two months making sure their game was technically functional.

With Steam, the entire process took five days.

“To be completely fair, though,” Carmel admitted, “this isn’t a fair comparison.” Steam has beena round for years and is a known quantity, whereas Games for Windows is relatively new. Still, though, it illustrates the inherent problems with the retail system.

You used to need a publisher to get funding and distribution. Thanks to Steam and Greenhouse and Direct2Drive and XBLA, however, you don’t need publishers for distribution anymore. the only thing indies really need, then, is funding — and that’s where the Indie Fund comes into play. (Again, I wish I had a photo, but this was illustrated in Carmel’s slideshow by a sad-looking developer suddenly getting ambushed by  the founders of the Indie Fund, who were for some reason drawn as happy little elves).

The Indie Fund, unlike regular publishing processes, is shorter and more transparent so devs won’t be dicked around like they might be by a larger corporation. Devs will talk with single individuals within the fund rather than jumping from lawyers to PR people to managements and back. The funders will allow their devs to work on a flexible development cycle: rather than working off a design doc and a bunch of milestones, which discourages iterative design and often produces shitty games, the funders will periodically compare where the game is versus where it used to be. Devs will not be punished for changing their game’s direction, or not adhering to a year-old idea of what the game should be.

The funders will also take no IP ownership. If the devs don’t wanna make a sequel, they don’t have to. If they do, then they have the freedom to make it for anyone they want. The funders also don’t exercise any control over the IP: if they provide funding for a game, that funding is an implicit vote of confidence in the developers and what they’re trying to do. It’s easy to assume that as the guy with the money, you know what’s better for the game than the developers do. If that ends up being true, however, then the indie fund shouldn’t be helping you out in the first place.

Carmel’s talk ended here, and he took a few audience questions.

How big is the fund? Carmel knew he’d be asked this, and gave out an admittedly pre-canned answer: it’s not the size of the fund that matters, so much as it is the number of games they can successfully develop in a year that make good use of the investment.

Another audience member asked how the Indie Fund will deal with distribution. According to Carmel, it won’t. The typical model looks like a chain, of developer-publisher-distributor; the distributor gets the money and gives it to the publisher, who then gives some to the developer. The Indie Fund will work differently, where the dev goes off and finds a distributor on their own, then gives a percentage of the revenue to the fund after paying off the initial investment.

When asked how the fund came about, Carmel mentioned that at last year’s GDC, a group of indies were trying to figure out how to get funding using everything from bootstrapping to government grants. Eventually, they found that there was enough money being made in the indie community to justify pulling some money together to help other indies out.

An audience member from Africa asked if the Fund would be interested in funding a game made by an African company, since the game development community there isn’t as well-recognized as those in the western worlds. Carmel responded that for much of World of Goo’s development, he and Kyle Gabler weren’t even on the same continent. Since everything’s digitally distributed, location doesn’t matter. 

We restrained ourselves from completely spoiling Heavy Rain in Monday’s Podtoid so that we could discuss the story in greater detail in last night’s very special EX+ Gaiden Alpha Bonus episode. You can find it here.

In it, we discuss MASSIVE HEAVY RAIN SPOILERS. Jim also does a Kevin Spacey impression at one point.

Additionally, there’s a bit at the very end where right before signing off, Samit says, “well, it’s a quarter to midnight.” Adam cut the recording there, but we went on to decide that “It’s a Quarter To Midnight” was the name of Samit’s Nickelback cover band, and that the next time he’s at an E3 party he has to do a karaoke version of “Hero.”

This week’s episode is a spoiler-free discussion of Heavy Rain, bookended by so

me random news and commentary stuff including the Portal secretz and the creepy Infinity Ward news that broke last night. Rey Gutierrez also shows up at the beginning to pimp out Dtoid video stuff.

You can listen to the show here or subscribe to us on iTunes.

Wave goodbye to the rest of your weekend.

Infectonator: World Dominator is a game about destroying the world with a zombie apocalypse. It’s less of a thinky-thinky kind of apocalypse, though, and more of a clicky-clicky one: you start an infection in a group of people, watch it spread, and spend the cash you get from killing humans to upgrade your zombies. It’s classic upgrade-based empowerment fantasy, executed superbly. Once you get about halfway through the game, you won’t even need to strategize anymore. You also won’t care, because holy sh*t I’m god of the zombies.

Watch in supervillain-esque glee as with the click of a single button, you create a smaller crowd of zombies that creates a larger crowd of zombies that eventually takes over an entire town, leaving it a smoldering ruin of its former self. Then, destroy the next town. Then, the entire country. Eventually, cackle with maniacal glee as the entire world falls under your zombie-spawning might.

I’m usually opposed to any games where you’re meant to sympathize with the undead — Stubbs the Zombie personally offends me — but you really can’t fault a game where Venom and Colonel Sanders are unlockable characters.

[via RockPaperShotgun]

_{[Editor's Note: We're not just a (rad) news site -- we also publish opinions/editorials from our community & employees like this one, though be aware that it may not jive with the opinions of Destructoid as a whole, or how our moms raised us. Want to post your own article in response? Publish it now on our community blogs.]}

Long, long ago, Destructoid premiered a feature entitled “Postpartum Impressions,” wherein the staff would discuss major games at least a month after their release. After the initial review, the subsequent editorials, and all the fanboy squabbling, what did the game leave us with?

As it turns out, we only did one of those articles before dropping the idea completely. Can’t remember why, truth be told. Either way, the series is back: Jonathan Ross, Chad Concelmo and I are here to bring you our hindsight-tacular Postpartum Impressions of Mass Effect 2.

Hit the jump to see if we still like the damn thing. Spoilers, obviously.

Anthony Burch:

So: a month after the game is out, when hindsight is hopefully kicking in, what do we think about the game? If you played it right after launch, have your thoughts changed on it in the intervening month? If you finished it just recently, how do you feel about it?

Chad Concelmo:

I played Mass Effect 2 really close to launch, and I am surprised how much I still think about the game — despite playing several other triple-A titles since.

For me, two things really stuck with me: 1) The characters, obviously, and how diverse and interesting each of them are, and 2) the rather extraordinary script and writing that went into the game — something that many people seem to notice, but fail to single out.

It’s rare that I will hit the 20 or 30 hour mark in a game and keep listening to every single dialogue choice. I truly

never got bored, and that’s saying a lot. Even after all these weeks I keep thinking about specific conversations and interactions I had with certain characters — such as anything with my favorite character Jack. A lot of the seemingly simple conversations stuck with me more than something like the epic, towering final battle, and that’s saying a lot.

I can’t wait to replay the game someday and see how my different choices affect the outcome. I was lucky and saved my entire crew, but who knows what will happen next time?

After all these weeks, I truly feel that Mass Effect 2 is a genuine classic, filled with memorable sequences that I will remember for years to come. In a loud, expensive, over-the-top space opus, it’s nice (and quite surprising!) to see the game’s quieter moments sticking with me the most.

Jonathan Ross:

I was in kind of an interesting position because I hated Mass Effect 1. Like absolutely detested. I bought Day 1 on 360, played it for about 10 hours, and was already so sick of the Mako and the same three dungeon layouts I put it down and planned on never picking it up again.

When Mass Effect 2 came out, I really didn’t care at all. I assumed it would be more of the same. As more positive reviews came in, both from the press and people I talk to regularly, I started to reconsider. After being told multiple times that I had to use a ME1 game to get the full impact, I decided to suck it up.

Got ME1 off Steam, played through it in about a week. The PC version is much better than the console one, but it still had a lot of the same flaws. I was able to finish the game, but it still wasn’t very pleasant. I agree the story of ME1 is good, but the gameplay is so bad it cripples it.

With ME1 knocked out, I started ME2 with pretty low expectations.

Wow, was I wrong.

Mass Effect 2 fixed virtually all of the complaints I had with the first game, and in almost every case (but one, which I’ll get to in a second), dramatically exceeded my expectations. I grabbed ME2 about a week after it came out, and finished it in about 5 days with 30 hours of gameplay — something that’s INCREDIBLY rare for me nowadays. About 3 weeks after playing it, I can honestly say it’s one of the best games I’ve played this generation, and probably even last generation too. Everything from the writing, to the gameplay, to the level design, to the dialog, is polished to a degree that surpasses pretty much every game that’s been released in the last two years. (Hey, Infinity Ward, you could learn something.)

I did encounter a few graphical glitches (getting stuck in the geometry a couple times), but I judiciously used quicksave so it was never a big deal.

My one major complaint with Mass Effect 2, and it becomes more apparent as I distance myself from the game, is that I feel the paragon/renegade choices were really poorly done in comparison to Mass Effect 1. I had just completed a ME1 full renegade runthrough literally 2 hours before starting ME2, so it was pretty fresh in my mind, and the renegade choices in that game I think were a lot deeper and much more mature. In ME1, being a renegade meant operating slightly outside of the law, bending the rules but not exactly breaking them (unless no one was around to see you), and threatening people to get what you wanted. In many cases, you could earn renegade points by pretending to treat people with respect while really manipulating them to get information/extra rewards, and that was how I played my Shepherd — a gruff war veteran who really respected, trusted, and loved his crew, and a guy who didn’t put up with shit from anyone, but he did it without being a flagrant in your face dick.

In ME2, the paragon/renegade choices were so bipolar it was ridiculous. In virtually every counter, you had to choose between being a raging asshole or Mother Theresa. In many dialogue responses, I would be shocked to find Paragon points being awarded simply for asking someone “Why is this information so important to you?” I assumed I would be using that information to try to squeeze a reward out of them, but apparently I was just super concerned about their well-being and being a really nice guy. The most bizarre case of this to me was the quest you do for Liara where you’re trying to find the Shadow Broker’s informant — you actually get Paragon points for telling her to assassinate an innocent person. WHAT? (I guess the logic is you’re helping her, but WTF. Telling her to kill someone because you were too lazy to put the pieces together doesn’t seem very paragon-ish to me.)

By the same token, I hated that being a renegade in this game meant being a dick to the crew. In the first game, it was basically you using tough love to help them through their problems; in this one, it’s you telling them to shut the fuck up. Any sign of concern for your crew is seen as a paragon action, and that’s so drastically different to the first game that I felt that I was really playing a different Shepard.

That said, while it was (and still sticks out as) a major flaw in the game, I still absolutely love it. It’s just the one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb for me for an otherwise perfect game. Bipolar morality systems are a major weakness in a lot of games. I understand why they’re necessary in a videogame, but Dragon Age and ME1 gave me the impression that Bioware was really one of the only developers who understood how to introduce realistic shades of grey into it, so I was surprised to see it return in this game.

Anthony:

Could you be more specific about what you loved about ME2 that ME1 failed to do? Was it the characters? The lack of Mako missions? The improved gunplay? The suicide mission?

Jonathan:

Sure.

My biggest complaint about ME1 I think was that the environments were completely uninspired. The 5-6 main missions were well done, but the rest of the game was literally the exact same dungeons repeated (and you had to go through them a billion times if you wanted to do the sidequests), and the same boring planets with obnoxious terrain that really did nothing except waste your time.

The Mako controls were absolutely terrible, the Mako itself was so floaty and bouncy it was ridiculous, and I feel it added absolutely nothing to the game whatsoever except wasted time and annoyance. I also wasn’t a huge fan of scanning in ME2, but I spent FAR less time scanning than I did with that Mako, and with a mouse it really wasn’t all that bad, especially if I broke it up across missions.

I tend to play snipers in games like this, so the removal of the ridiculous sniper scope sway was a welcome blessing. I feel like they balanced it well with the really limited ammo of the sniper rifles — normally games with sniper classes I can pretty much blow through the game because headshots are so easy (even on the first one with the sway). Headshots were still easy in ME2, but I had to save them for tougher fights — I couldn’t just go in sniping every single guy I ran across. I did miss the lack of crouch, although I think they implemented cover pretty well. I’m generally not a fan of cover systems, but all in all this one worked out fine.

I think the loyalty missions were awesome in that you got to learn much more about your crew than you did in the first game. They were all much deeper characters than the original group (aside from Zaeed), and I felt a lot more of an investment in them than I did in the first game. In ME1, I was actually annoyed that I couldn’t abandon both Ashley and Kaidin, because I thought they were both whiny and obnoxious. In ME2, I wanted to make sure that not a single crew member died. Thinking about it now though, I do wish there was a little more banter between your squadmates in the second game as you explored around — I feel like in the first one your crew members spontaneously talked a lot more.

The gameplay or choices in the suicide mission itself didn’t really strike me that much — I thought that the choices were relatively obvious considering what you had been told throughout the game. I did have Mordin randomly die during my first finish, but a quick reload from quicksave fixed that problem. What surprised me about the suicide mission was how much I cared if anyone actually died — in the first game, I really didn’t give a shit about anyone other than Tali and Wrex.

On a separate note, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m also really impressed with all the little choices from the first game that carried over. Stuff I had already forgotten about doing literally 3 or 4 days before would randomly pop up in ME2, either in some side conversation or as an actual plot point. I’ve heard though that regardless of how you played the game before it’s fundamentally the same and the overall plot really doesn’t change, but having only played through it once with an old character I found it really well done. If you had asked me before I started reading about the game on the internet, I would have thought my choices in the first game made a fairly significant impact.

Anthony:

I find it interesting that most everyone compliments the story elements of ME2, even though if you look at it, the actual plot is really kind of pointless: we don’t learn anything very new about the Reapers, the Collector’s aren’t that scary, and the final boss fight comes out of nowhere. Is it because the game focuses more on your supporting characters (whom we all seem to like) rather than the overall plot, maybe?

I didn’t really give a shit about stopping the Collectors so much as I wanted to make sure my crew lived through it.

On an unrelated note, I’d also have really preferred some sort of summary text explaining the choices that I made in the first game. Maybe it’s just me, but two years was more than enough time for me to forget what the hell a Rachni queen was, and what the hell I did to her.

On an even more unrelated note, the “skip dialogue” and “choose dialogue” buttons need to be separate. Always. Characters nearly died because of this.

Chad:

See, I agree with Jonathan about how good the writing and story are in Mass Effect 2, but when he talks about how great the level design is, I have to disagree … to a point.

If you really  think about the level design in Mass Effect 2, there is almost nothing there. Sure, the levels are gorgeous and much more varied this time around, but the amount of impassable obstacles and similar layouts make everything feel very linear and almost boring.

When you compare the actual gameplay and RPG level design to something like Final Fantasy VI or Lost Odyssey, the stuff in Mass Effect 2 pales in comparison. The “villages” in ME2 alone are so simple in comparison. Heck, even the gorgeous Citadel has been stripped down to one room.

But the reason this stuff is okay and even accepted is because the tone of the game is so strong. Having such strong characters and a strong story is such a focus that you can forget how little the game has to offer when it comes to the actual gameplay.

Again, not to say it is bad by any means, but just think about the shooting mechanics when compared to something like Modern Warfare, or the RPG gameplay when compared to something so rich in classic elements like Dragon Quest VIII. In a weird way, Mass Effect 2 — despite all its huge, dramatic set pieces — is a small, intimate game.

And that’s what makes it so great … and so fascinating.

But I do think it is a misconception to say that the gameplay and level design in the game are really anything superb. They are both special and original and, most importantly, meaningful, but they never reach the heights of other games in similar genres.

Anthony:

Actually, Chad, I agree and disagree with you: the design of the combat areas are maybe a bit dull, but I really, really prefer the new design of the towns/villages/space stations/whathaveyou. The Citadel in the first game was initially this really beautiful, striking place, but then I just got sick of spending SO much time going from area to area. It didn’t need to be as big as it was.

Contrast that to any of the towns in ME2: everything is really tightly packed together, so it’s quick and easy to find what you want. I could hear “this is my favorite store in the citadel” three times in the span of two minutes, and I think that’s a good thing.

In terms of the actual shooting, it does get a little repetitive. I loved the new biotic interface, the new gun handling, and the ammo system (I liked being encouraged to switch between all of my weapons, rather than just use The One That Works For Every Situation like I did in the first game), but so many quests basically boiled down to “go to this place and shoot these guys” without really significant variation.

Chad, is there anything that recently occurred to you about the game that you hadn’t thought of or noticed when you first played it? Something that became clear with hindsight?

Jonathan:

I see what you’re saying, but I think that’s what Mass Effect 2 actually needed. One of the problems with Mass Effect 1 was that they thought they had to make everything massive and open, but like you said it’s a small intimate experience. I credit them with realizing that, and tailoring things appropriately. I get what you’re saying about the invisible barriers, but I feel like at least here it was well done. No “Turn back now!” prompt out of nowhere (at least that I encountered) — all the barriers at least seemed blended into the environment.

I don’t think good level design always means huge dramatic open areas (although many games could benefit from it), I think it means recognizing what type of game you have and tailoring the levels appropriately. Even while being careful in the “linear” levels, I still missed a couple upgrades and stuff simply because I didn’t explore enough. You are definitely right that the locales of Lost Odyssey and the Final Fantasy games are much broader and more expansive, but you have to remember those are specifically games about wandering around and exploring.

I am, though, probably looking at this in direct comparison to ME1 since I played them back to back. I am a little surprised that you found the ME2 layouts to be similar, because overall I felt that each area was pretty distinct and different (again, especially compared to the first game).

As a somewhat-random aside while we’re talking about design, I also think that Afterlife is one of the most well done “club” areas in a videogame ever.

Anthony:

Anything you guys really didn’t like? Any hopes for Mass Effect 3?

Jonathan:

There was nothing that stood out to me that I absolutely hated, I guess the closest thing would be scanning, but I still considered it an improvement over the Mako, and like I said before with a mouse it wasn’t all THAT bad, so I was willing to be a bit more forgiving.

My hopes for Mass Effect 3 are that they whip the paragon/renegade system back into shape, that I can recruit Tali and Wrex for my crew, and that they nail down a way to make mineral collection/upgrading more fun/interactive, or just scrap it entirely.

The other thing I just thought of that I didn’t touch on before, is that I also feel the exploration part of Mass Effect 2 was lacking, in the sense of driving around the galaxy doing stuff. Granted, I didn’t fully explore all the galaxies in ME2, but I feel that they went from the extreme of Mass Effect 1, with there being far too much mindless/pointless stuff to do (like driving the Mako around) in virtually every galaxy you went to, as well as a lot of repetitive side quests, to almost nothing in ME2. All quests are given to you and explicitly tell you where to go, and as far as I could tell visiting unimportant galaxies just mean planets to scan. I managed to hit all upgrades though without having to really do any kind of exploration, since the “Good” and “Rich” planets provided me with more than enough resources to get everything I needed.

So, I guess I’d like a little more incentive to explore the galaxy, without it being reduced to visiting the same dungeon and fighting the same enemies over and over again. Even if it’s just something like visiting a city that’s non-cruicial to the story that sells weapons and stuff, or things that just help flesh out the game world a little more.

Oh, I’d also really like to be able to land on Earth and walk around. It’s been two games and we still haven’t seen it!

Anthony:

Did either of you have any trouble getting all of your crew loyal? The game seems to have been balanced as if it’d be an actual challenge to get your entire crew to love you, but I haven’t spoken to more than one or two people who weren’t able to easily get everyone loyal.

Up until the ending (when I screwed up beautifully and picked the wrong squad leaders), I didn’t really have to make any serious decisions about my crew’s survival. Their survivability had a direct correlation solely with the amount of time I plugged into the whole experience, rather than serious, Dragon Age-esque decisions.

Jonathan:

I actually didn’t even know it was possible to “fail” a loyalty mission. I thought it was all pretty up front and in your face about how to go about doing it, and once you started the mission there was no way to actually fuck it up.

One thing I DID have trouble with, though, is that I never got the dinner scene with Kelly where she agrees to feed your fish. Everyone was talking about it, it sounded like it was really easy to trigger, but I schmoozed with her constantly and never actually had that happen. I still don’t know exactly how I missed it.

Anthony:

I was fucking all up on Kelly. She was, like, my side squeeze. Even while I was having these Big Moral Conundrums about whether it’d even be okay to try and knock boots with Tali since Liara was still alive (if really dark and creepy now), I had absolutely no qualms about being the most irresponsible commander ever and hitting on Kelly whenever possible.

She fed the shit out of my fish.

But yeah, presumably, the devs may have thought that it was supposed to be kind of hard to get full loyalty, possibly discounting the fact that (A) Paragon/Renegade stuff can be used to talk anyone out of anything, and (B) people always use Paragon/Renegade dialogue options because they represent a more concrete method of success in exchange for roleplaying believability.

I’m really happy I lost a couple of my crew for dramatic purposes, but I wish their deaths had resulted from my borking up their loyalty missions early on, or making really tough decisions that necessitated character death, versus my just screwing up the crew assignments at the end.

I want NPC blood flowing down the screen in Mass Effect 3. I want to have to choose between saving Wrex or saving myself, saving Tali and Liara or saving the universe.

Going back to what you said earlier, why do you think you liked the NPCs more in this game? Is it because the loyalty missions put their histories and motivations front-and-center? Or is it that they’re simply more well-written than most of the ME1 characters?

Jonathan:

I think it’s because I was more invested in them. In the first game, I exclusively used Tali and Wrex, and basically had 0 interaction with any of my other crewmembers, other than Ashley being a raging racist in cutscenes and Liara being stupid. In ME2, I was actually forced to get to know the characters, which I think was a good move by Bioware because I felt a legitimate connection to most of them. (This is all not counting Zaeed, of course, who was tacked on DLC trash.)

Anthony:

Any final thoughts on ME2? Were some justified in claiming that the 2010 GOTY came out in January?

Jonathan:

I think it’s early to be calling GOTY,  but I can definitely say it’s one of the best games I’ve played. I’m hoping that the premature GOTY stuff sticks around for the end of the year, since I feel like most GOTY awards ignore everything from Jan. – July. Mass Effect 2 will definitely be a contender.

Chad:

Just like Resident Evil 4, I think Mass Effect 2 is good enough to win many awards at the end of the year, despite the fact that it came out in January. It really is that good.

Only time — and God of War III, for me — will tell.

“Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.”

Roger Ebert said this. He is correct.

Now, that’s not enough reason to discount an entire medium as being incapable of producing “high art” — it might be true if games were nothing more than yet another linear storytelling medium, though they obviously aren’t — but it goes a hell of a long way in explaining why Heavy Rain has been so divisive.

During an average Heavy Rain playthrough, two forces constantly compete over control of the characters: the player, who wants to see interesting things and feel like his input actually matters to the story, and the actual characters, who simply want to be true to themselves.

This is what Ebert was talking about. This is why, for many, Heavy Rain just doesn’t work.

(Spoilers for the film Se7en, and Heavy Rain. Joseph Leray gave me the idea for this editorial.)

Think back to the movie Se7en. Remember the ending? Not the big, shocking, oh-god-that’s-so-gruesome-but-kinda-cool twist, but the scene that directly follows it?

Detective Mills, having lost everything dear to him, has to decide John Doe’s fate. He desperately wants to avenge the death of his wife, but Somerset has warned him: John Doe wants you to kill him. He wants you to be overcome by Wrath.

What if we could choose whether or not Mills should pull the trigger? What if, as Heavy Rain so often does, we were allowed to decide not only what Mills should do, but subsequently who he is as a person, and what the overall theme of the film should be?

On the one hand, that’d be a satisfyingly difficult choice to make, in the context of a BioWare RPG or whathaveyou. No clear “right” answer. Could be a pretty suspenseful moment of contemplation for the player.

On the other hand, Mills is already his own character: he went through the entire film getting into arguments and beating up paparazzi. If the player made Mills put his gun down and let John Doe rot in prison, it’d be wildly inaccurate with his character, and it’d effectively demolish the thematic punch of the scene’s true outcome. Se7en is (amongst other things) about the ubiquitousness of human evil, and how we can’t truly separate ourselves from it. If Mills lets John Doe live, it becomes a story about a Really Good Cop triumphing over a Really Evil Guy.

It’d be ludicrous to let the audience choose what Mills should do. Why, then, are we allowed to do exactly that with all four of Heavy Rain’s protagonists?

For the vast majority of Heavy Rain, I, as the player, have only two options: I can force the characters to do things that they wouldn’t normally do for my entertainment, or I can feel useless.

Take the “romance” scene between Ethan and Madison later in the game. Madison wants to have sex with Ethan, but Ethan — possibly having just cut off his pinky finger, run through power lines, crawled over broken glass, and earned a concussion from a car crash — says that “saving Shaun is the only thing that matters.” Madison goes in for the kiss. The player has a choice to make: do you let Madison kiss Ethan, or do you make Ethan refuse?

Even ignoring the fact that Ethan specifically tells Madison nothing matters apart from saving Shaun — he doesn’t say “nothing, apart from me getting my freak on” — this is a guy who has gone through immeasurable mental and physical trauma to save his son (unless you made Ethan refuse to complete any of the trials, in which case I’d have to ask why you’re even playing the game). This is a guy who knows that every wasted second brings his son closer and closer to death. Under no circumstances would it make any sense for this guy to have sex with Madison.

But if you’re curious about how the sex scene will play out, or if you have some personal interest in getting these two characters to screw regardless of their motivations, you can force Ethan to have sex with her. Congrats: you get to watch a sex scene and a murder at the same time, as Ethan’s true character is obliterated before your eyes. Ebert proves himself right: your ability to control the story has resulted in a bad story.

But what if, when Madison moves in to kiss Ethan, you refuse her? What if, understanding Ethan’s nature, you push Madison away? Great — you’ve maintained the integrity of the story and its characters, but you’ve also reduced the game to nothing more than a finicky DVD which must be unpaused every few minutes. If Ethan’s character is already pretty well set in stone and you’re just going through the motions you would expect him to go through, then why are you involved at all? If your personal interaction consists of nothing more than giving up your identity and making a character do something he would normally do anyway, then what differentiates your experience from that of watching a film? Your input no longer matters.

Heavy Rain’s player/avatar dissonance is even more pronounced when the player and the character desire different things. Say you’re interested in getting the “best” ending, because you really want the Four Heroes trophy. Since you assume that getting to Ethan’s son is the best way of assuring Ethan survives, you successfully complete the first four trials without difficulty.

Upon reaching the fifth trial, however, you find yourself in a pickle: the only way to get the final piece of the address is to force Ethan to drink poison, which will absolutely, positively kill him in sixty minutes (if you’ve already completed the game, please try to ignore the fact that it absolutely, positively does not). You want Ethan to survive so you can get that Four Heroes trophy, so you decide not to have Ethan drink the poison. But wait: you just created a version of Ethan Mars who is willing to endure intense physical torment and commit murder to save his son…but who won’t drink some poison to completely ensure Shaun’s survival? That doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t accept that if you saw an otherwise-consistent character do that in a film, would you?

And don’t even get me started on how your decisions, combined with that stupid plot twist, can turn Scott Shelby into even more of a laughably inconsistent character than he already is (so, you’ll drown kids to test their fathers, but you won’t let a would-be murderer die of a heart attack?).

“But,” you might say, “what about a game like Half-Life 2? That’s a linear story, but you still have the freedom to dramatically sabotage it. You can spend the entire prologue throwing milk cartons at the residents of City 17, if you really want to. How is that any different?”

You can definitely sabotage Half-Life 2 if you wish, but the alternative to “sabotage the story” is not “get bored and feel useless.” While you don’t have any input over the direction of HL2’s story, you still have a personal reason to keep playing: the action sections that comprise the majority of the game are fun enough that even if you don’t give two shits about Alyx Vance, your input still feels relevant.

If you wanna sabotage HL2’s story, you can, but you’ll still have some fun with the shooty-shooty stuff. If you don’t sabotage HL2’s story, then the shooty-shooty stuff just feels more meaningful. It’s an imperfect combination of story and gameplay, but the failure of one part doesn’t destroy the entire experience. As Heavy Rain consists of nothing beyond some QTE’s and a boatload of story decisions, it’s got nothing to fall back on if the player decides to ruin the story by screwing with the characters.

Ebert says player choice can ruin a story. If we’re talking about purely player-driven narrative, he’s wrong: Boatmurdered, Alice & Kev, and Permanent Death prove there is a unique and beautiful power in giving the player some freedom to make their own individually meaningful stories, rather than just passively absorbing a pre-baked experience crafted by someone else. To claim that pre-baked experiences are inherently more meaningful than player-created ones is nonsense.

If we’re talking about forcing the player through a totally linear story a la Half-Life 2, he’s right, but perhaps not right enough to justify dismissal of the entire medium. Many players who don’t sabotage story games find them uniquely compelling. There’s something to be said for allowing the player to be the protagonist of a story rather than a passive witness, sabotage possibilities be damned.

If we apply his line of thinking to “interactive movies” such as Heavy Rain, however, Ebert is totally on the money.

The characters of Heavy Rain are not blank slates, or characters whose identities we fill in through our own decisions — they aren’t like Gordon Freeman or Commander Shepard. They’re characters with existing histories and personalities. By granting us control over these characters, the player is forced into an awkward position of half-agency: their desires intermingle with our own, forcing us to either relinquish our own sense of control and relevance, or actively participate in a story populated by characters who make ridiculous and self-defeating decisions.

As courageous as Heavy Rain is, and as suspenseful as some of its later QTE’s are (three cheers for potentially permanent protagonist death! A fourth cheer for alliteration!), the player’s ability to manipulate the behavior of its characters actively and irreversibly harm the story. You can shake your fist at Ebert for as long as you want, but it won’t change the fact that he made a good point — and that Heavy Rain proves it true.

“Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin” is a surreal, videogame-related comedy series by Destructoid staffers. Well, two of them. Well, one.

I’m pretty happy with this week’s episode of Hey Ash and, unusually, other people seem to be as well. The trade-off for not particularly caring when everyone hates an episode, however, is that you also can’t particularly care when people seem to fall in love with one.

Fair trade.

Also, I just remembered that I forgot to put an advertisement for the HAWP site (or DVD, or podcast, or whatever) at the end of the episode. Whoops.

Roughly 90% of Cream Wolf’s charm comes from discovering what the game is actually about, so I’ll leave you to it.

For the sake of making this news post more than a single sentence, though, I’ll point out that it was made by PixelJam and messhof. Those guys are good at making games.

Now, go play Cream Wolf.