Continuing from Yesterday …
#5. Inconsistant Save Game Methods
I’ve had a long-standing gripe about Save Points, and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is the biggest example of this culprit. As a man in his mid-30s, with two children and a full time job, I don’t want to have to play and play and play the game until I get to the point you’ve told me to go to so that I can save the game. I don’t have the patience or time for that. I stopped playing Dead Rising, a zombie game for cripe’s sake, because of this very ‘feature’. No. It doesn’t add to the sense of tension; no it shouldn’t be used as a gameplay mechanic.
But this year I’m happy to say that there weren’t many games like that…but there were other annoyances. Let’s take Fable 2 for instance: while I don’t mind a single savegame slot (it forces the player to think about their choices) I do mind when the game can be completely corrupted by unsightly bugs. And Fallout 3…while it’s nice to be able to save anywhere, the process is annoying AND gets slower with every save game I make. And I have to admit to abusing the system and I know others who have: save before making a choice and reload to see the other outcome.
Let’s look at Gears of War everyone: not once have I ever had to think about a savegame or point. That’s how it should be. And I applaud their efforts.
#4. Crappy Movie-based Titles
Get it right people! I’m really dreading the Watchman game, especially when they announced it was a Brawler. That game should be an RPG, and nothing else. We know there were other masked vigilantes during the period, why not BE one of them with the Minutemen in your party? Have we not learned anything from the Lord of the Rings games? Build the system, swap in the content. And release the game when it’s ready, not when the movie releases.
#3. Escort Missions
Please. Just stop it. There was a few in Grand Theft Auto IV, I’m currently in the middle of one in Fallout 3…and no matter what game it is, the end result is that the designer diverts (not vary) from the established gameplay and the entire gameplay experience revolves around whether the A.I. has been coded well. Which in most cases, it has not. Let’s get these out of our repertoire and move on. Please?
#2. Weak A.I.
We’ve all been a victim of it and we’ve all been astounded when it’s good. While we are seeing greater quality of artificial intelligence and design, we’re still seeing comrades run headfirst into gunfire and NPCs that run into a wall because they can’t pathfind. Even in Fable 2 and Fallout 3, two of my top games of 2008, we’re still in that ‘uncanny valley’ of character behaviour that make the digital actors seem more like damp sock-puppets hooked on the ends of dogtails than parts of your game experience. And many times it pulls you out of the experience and reminds you that you are, indeed, in your underwear, on your couch, watching pixels and vectors on your shitty-ass TV. There are a lot of games making great progress in both design and programming of artificial intelligence and it’s been on more than one occasion when I’ve wished for one game’s AI to be in another game’s experience.
#1. Lack of Standards and shared resources in the Game Industry
If you look at all of the comments I made about the last year’s issues, you’ll find that the common theme is shared resources. If you look at established industries like auto-manufacturing and film, you see that while there are many different studios that work within these sectors, they all use established and common standards and technology. It is these standards and technologies that make the process more of a factory, where people are less concerned with how they will make hair move real, or characters react convincingly, or animations not look they’ve been sopped in a rue of cornstarch and glue, or how a combustion engine will work. They concentrate on making the next best story or blockbuster, or the next best-selling car. If the Game Industry would share their findings more, we’d see an increase of the quality of games and, hopefully, a decrease in the overhead cost of them because a majority of the time wouldn’t be spent on making engines, or developing the next best shaders. Our industry has matured over the last 10 years and we are just beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel with this: engines like Unreal are becoming more common in the industry; while some look on EA buying developers up as a bad thing, what is great about this, as a member of one of those bought developers, is that we are seeing more shared resources: people are talking to people to find out how they did their great thing. And I for one would love to see BioWare’s story and conversations in a Medal of Honor game featuring Oblivion’s open world and Burnout Paradise’s seamless online tools.
All in all, it was another great year for games, but we have a long way to go to get out of our early twenties and into a more mature stature. But despite the state of the global economy, I hold a lot of promise for the future. Tugging purse strings can do great things for creativity (Star Wars) and being smarter about how things are made can only mean great things for the long term.
As summary, here are my top games from 2008:
Fable 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Fallout 3
Braid
NHL09
Dead Space
Parts of Mirror’s Edge
