2366: Bigger Open Worlds Aren’t Always Better

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Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed has 420 collectible flags scattered around its open world. They don’t actually do anything other than unlock a few achievements — they don’t give protagonist Altair any new abilities or open up any fun bonus content in the game. They’re just there for the sake of it.

WayForward’s Shantae has 12 collectible fireflies scattered around its open world. Collecting all of them is the only way for protagonist Shantae to learn a dance that allows her to heal herself.

Shantae also has 20 collectible Baby Warp Squids hidden in its four dungeons — five per dungeon. Every four Warp Squids allows Shantae to learn a dance that lets her teleport to one of the game’s five towns, providing a convenient shortcut across the game world.

With modern games (I know Assassin’s Creed isn’t that new now, but Ubisoft is still using its basic model for most of its games) it seems the assumption is the bigger the game world, the better — it doesn’t matter if there’s not all that much to do in the game world, so long as you can spout the tired old PR line about “see that mountain over there? You can actually go to it.”

It’s not true, though. I mean, a big open world is impressive to look at, particularly if it’s rendered in lovely graphics — heavily modded Skyrim and vanilla The Witcher 3 spring to mind here — but if said open world consists of vast tracts of nothingness between areas with actual activities to participate in, then there’s really not a lot of point to it all, save to give the player a sense of scale.

Shantae, despite being a Game Boy Color game, is an open world game, presented from a side-on perspective as a platform game: the subgenre commonly referred to these days as “Metroidvania”. But the world of her adventure isn’t unnecessarily sprawling and filled with vast tracts of nothingness; it’s compact and focused, with every area designed around a distinct visual theme, allowing you to immediately know where you are in the world, which eventually loops right around on itself if you get to one of the far edges of it.

This is good design in the context of it being a video game. Sure, the landscapes of Shantae may not be particularly realistic, but they make for a fun game experience that doesn’t feel like it’s dragging things out unnecessarily. It’s also paced such that the player always feels like they’re making progress, and the optional sidequests — the Warp Squids and the Fireflies — feel eminently achievable for most players and provide a tangible, genuinely useful reward in both instances. Compare and contrast with Assassin’s Creed’s 420 flags that don’t do anything, where only the most dedicated achievement whores will bother participating in this pointless waste of everyone’s time.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a big game — I’m enjoying The Witcher 3 a great deal. But if my game is big, there better be something to do or something interesting to see in every square inch of that landscape, otherwise I’m just going to fast travel from one corner of the world to the other. And I’m certainly not going to find all those fucking flags.

#oneaday Day 823: Information Diet

Know what I hate? Chavs. Know what else? Teaching. Know what else? We could be here a while. I’ll tell you. Press embargoes.

I get why they happen, obviously — publishers and their PR people want to ensure that coverage of something is coordinated nicely so that everyone gets suitably whipped up into a frenzy all at the same time. But there’s an unfortunate side-effect if you happen to, say, follow a bunch of different video games outlets at the time a major announcement happens: everyone bellows the same fucking thing at the exact same fucking time.

It’s happening more and more nowadays, too. The most notable examples that stick in my head in recent memory are Assassin’s Creed III and Borderlands 2, both titles that I have a passing interest in but find myself becoming curiously resistant to the more and more I get battered in the face with the same information from slightly different angles.

I think, on the whole, this is the “problem” I have been having with mainstream gaming overall. There’s too much information out there — too much coverage, too many “behind the scenes” videos, too many “exclusive” interviews, too many press releases announcing a single screenshot (yes, that is a real thing I received today and I have no shame in naming Square Enix as the perpetrator). After a while, you become completely saturated with information about a product and subsequently have absolutely no inclination to want to touch it, ever. This was a big part of why I didn’t want to play Mass Effect 3, for example — EA’s appalling behaviour was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, really.

I feel for my friends who work in games PR for “B-tier” games, too. It’s hard enough to get a title like, say, Risen 2 noticed at the best of times but when you’re competing with everyone beating themselves into an orgasmic and/or angry frenzy over Mass Effect 3, there’s little hope for your title outside of groups of people like me who have forsaken the mainstream in favour of enjoying less heavily marketed titles.

Conversely, the games I have been playing and enjoying are the ones where information has been trickling out slowly, usually straight from the developers mouths without dribbling through the PR sieve. Take the “Operation Rainfall” RPGs Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower (which I’m currently playing), for example — these received very little in the way of press attention despite being fantastic games. The aforementioned Operation Rainfall, a grassroots campaign to get these three excellent games localised and released in Europe and the US, received plenty of press, but information on the games themselves was conspicuously absent. As a result, I was able to go into all three of them pretty much blind and have a fantastic experience in the process — a big part of what made all of them great is the sense of discovery inherent in all of them. That just doesn’t happen if you’ve been smothered in information for the six months leading up to the game’s release.

As a result of all this, I’ve come to a decision, and if you’re feeling the same way as me, I recommend you follow it too.

Cut back. Cut out the crap. If you follow a buttload of games journalists and outlets on Twitter, unfollow them. If you want some gaming news, pick one outlet and keep it on your follow list, but chances are if you follow lots of gaming fans, someone will retweet the news as it happens anyway. Otherwise, go seek out the news when it’s convenient for you. Check the sites when you feel like it. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Use Google Currents or Flipboard to receive information in an easily-digestible format. Receive information on your terms, not that of a carefully-crafted PR campaign.

This doesn’t have to apply just to games — it can apply to pretty much anything that suffers from the problems described above. Film, TV, celebrity news, business, tech… anything, really.

I’m going to give this a try. It will doubtless initially feel somewhat weird to not see some familiar faces and logos in my Twitter timeline, but I have a strange feeling that I’ll be a lot happier, less frustrated and less cynical as a result. Check back with me in a week or two and we’ll see.

(If you’re one of the people I do happen to unfollow, it’s nothing personal. You just might want to consider getting separate professional and personal accounts!)

#oneaday Day 632: Safety and Peace, My Friend

So I beat Assassin’s Creed. Yay! I’m glad I finally did this, as it was rather enjoyable. The game’s flaws are very much apparent, but the narrative was enough to keep me wanting to play through to the end.

The game is a completionist’s nightmare. It’s full of progress bars and things to fill in that are completely unnecessary. Most people who have played it will, by now, know that there is absolutely no purpose whatsoever to collecting all the flags in each city, or killing all the Templars, or even doing every “Investigation” side mission when preparing for each chapter’s assassinations. Fortunately, I knew this already going into the game — it didn’t stop me from completely clearing the first few chapters, but then my copy of Assassin’s Creed II, the game from the series that I was really interested in playing, showed up. So, naturally, I just wanted to finish it.

The ending of the game was… a little odd. (Spoilers ahead.) While the majority of the game was pretty realistic in tone and obviously based on historical events (with, I imagine, a bit of artistic license taken) the final battle was rather odd. I wasn’t expecting a “fight every boss again at the same time” sort of situation, nor was I expecting a final boss with quasi-magical powers able to split himself into multiple forms.

Following the credits, the stuff you can read about on the Abstergo computers does, however, make it clear that we’re dealing with sci-fi here. The material about orbital satellites for mind control, the fact Africa was wiped out by a plague and. obviously, the technology on display — it makes it clear that all is not exactly what it seems.

I dug the story though. I enjoy a good conspiracy theory tale and even if it’s somewhat unsurprising to see the Templars involved in this sort of behaviour yet again, the way the story unfolded was interesting and kept me guessing up until the end, were it not for the fact that I inadvertently spoiled who the final boss was before I got to it. Oh well.

The thing I like most about it, though, is the fact that there’s a ton of possibilities for the series. Desmond is a likeable enough character, and the “exploring memories” angle leaves things nicely open for travelling through lots of different time periods. In some ways, it’s a bit of a shame that we’ve only seen Altair and Ezio so far — I’m hoping I’ll see the apparent appeal of the latter once I make a start on II tomorrow. Something must have inspired Ubi to keep on with him for three games. (Money, probably — but most layers of the series I’ve spoken to seem to be a fan of the character.)

Ubisoft has said that Desmond’s story will have to be wrapped up by the end of next year, however, but that doesn’t (and likely won’t) mean the series will be over. Desmond is, of course, “Subject Seventeen” — there are, then, sixteen subjects prior to him to explore, including at least one of whom that went completely mental and splattered conspiracy theories all over the walls in blood. That could be an interesting story to follow up on — or perhaps the end of Desmond’s cycle will leave things open for another subject.

I can’t really comment any more because I know literally nothing about what happens in II, Brotherhood and Revelations. Having beaten the first game now, however, I am very much looking forward to finding out.

Safety and peace, my friend.

#oneaday Day 627: Hashashin

Finally started playing Assassin’s Creed again tonight — yes, the first one, and yes, I know the later ones are much better, but I want to know the story from the beginning.

Assassin’s Creed is a story whose premise intrigued me immensely as soon as the details of its now well known “meta plot” leaked out. I mean, sure, simply leaping around various cities and stabbing people in the neck is fun, but having a context for your actions that went beyond just Altaïr’s story was a cool idea — and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the upcoming Revelations.

Assassin’s Creed the first has its problems, sure, mostly relating to the “investigation” segment of the game, which tends to get a bit repetitive. (Also, the sheer pointlessness of the flag-collecting, which needless to say I shan’t be bothering with.) But it does so many things right. It has a wonderful sense of scale and height. Freerunning across rooftops and nimbly hopping from beam to beam never gets old. And the combat system, though relatively simple, is cinematic and satisfying.

I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it first time around — I think something “higher priority” came around and I never got around to returning to it — but I’m looking forward to seeing how the series pans out. I know Assassin’s Creed II and Brotherhood are better, for example, but I don’t know how. Since I’ve managed to find super-cheap copies, I will shortly be finding out.

The thing that’s struck me the most from playing this first game though is how much you can forget that top-tier games can feel truly “alive”. When you spend all day reading the marketingspeak that publishers of said top-tier games spout in press releases (coupled with utterly meaningless quotes from their VP of Talking Nonsense In As Many Words As Possible) it’s easy to forget that these games are exciting creative works, and the teams who work on them treat them as such.

Assassin’s Creed, for example, is awash with gorgeous details in its graphics and sound. Its cities are satisfying to explore and climb all over, even if there’s not really any incentive to beyond “woo, look at that view!” But if all the information you had on the game came from Ubi press releases, you wouldn’t know it, because they describe it as a product to be sold, not a creative endeavour to be enjoyed. And that’s kind of sad — though somewhat inevitable given the times we live in.

I shall be romping through the Assassin’s Creed series alongside Xenoblade at present. Maybe I’ll finish all of them before Revelations comes out. Or perhaps if I take my time a bit I can finish them all by the time Revelations gets a bit cheaper!

Oh, and if you spoil anything about any of the series, I will kill you dead.

#oneaday Day 71: Want Not

I haven’t bought anything “new” for some time now, be it a book, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray or game. (Actually, that’s a lie, I picked up Deathsmiles recently but only because if I didn’t grab a copy now I doubt I’d ever see it on store shelves ever again, but that’s beside the point. I probably shouldn’t have started on this aside as it is taking away from my original point somewhat. Forget I said anything and let’s start again.)

I haven’t bought anything “new” for some time now, be it a book, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray or game. (Actually… (No! Stop it!) What? (You know what.) Oh all right.) And you know what? I don’t miss it. (I’m going to focus on games here.) I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on Dragon Age II. There are many other things I could list but I won’t because it would be terribly boring.

There are many reasons I haven’t missed buying these things. Firstly and most obviously, it’s saving money, something I’m woefully short of at the minute. Secondly, though, there’s really no need to constantly have the latest and greatest the second it comes out. What does it achieve, really? You pay full price, have to enter six bajillion redemption codes to download all the DLC that should be on the game disc (don’t get me started!) and know that there’s going to be more of it in the future. Wait a few months and you could likely have a better edition for less money and more Stuff. You also get to avoid all the “pre-order bonus” bullshit that big publishers are starting to pull these days, because the content in question is often then included in that newer edition.

The third and probably most important reason, though, is that not rushing out to buy something awesome the second it comes out is the fact that you can then just enjoy what you’ve already got. I’m currently playing through Final Fantasy XIII, a game which I picked up months ago, played approximately 20 hours of, stopped due to something else coming out, and never went back to until recently. Now, those who dislike FFXIII will undoubtedly say that I shouldn’t have bothered, but I’m having a blast, and the fact I’m not feeling “pressured” to beat it as quickly as possible means that I can savour the beautiful world that makes up that game, take my time to explore and enjoy the extra content it has on offer, and move on to beat it when I’m good and ready. When I’ve beaten that, I have Demon’s Souls, Disgaea 3, Darksiders, Resident Evil 4, killer7 and a whole host of other things to play through—a backlog of games that literally covers years. Eventually I’ll get through them all—hopefully in time for a Dragon Age II game of the year edition or even Mass Effect 3.

Of course, this will all go out the window once Catherine comes out in the States and I immediately import it but hey. That’s another one that might end up being hard to find, so it’s an investment, hey?