The other night I watched My Fair Lady, the classic musical/romantic comedy starring Audrey Hepburn. I'm not a fan of musicals at all, but it's a classic and Rachel is fond of it from childhood.
I'd never realized why I disliked musicals so much. My Fair Lady helped me understand. It's not the acting or the story, the songs themselves or even the spontaneous song outbreak phenomenon that musicals are most often lambasted for. I ended up being frustrated by the heavyhanded delivery and stuttering pacing of the plot.
Musicals were developed for the stage, and film musicals were adapted from these stage productions. Early musicals played to the limitations of the stage, especially the lack of amplification. Subtelty was not an option, which dictated the plot points and their delivery. Everyone in the audience needed to understand what was going on, which meant every line had to be shouted, and the really important plot points and characterization needed to be repeated a dozen times in a catchy song, so people would remember what was going on. As the life of film went on, directors learned to exploit the elements unique to film; Brando's mumbling naturalism could be captured with well-tuned booms; the camera itself and the editing of the film could be used to convey two characters' feelings towards one another with the shift of an eyebrow and turn of the head, as opposed to a 5-minute song. My Fair Lady is fixed solidly in the 19th century mode of the stageplay, and all that entails.
What this translates to is a very long and hammy production, which plays to none of the strengths of the medium. This is where I started to think about video games.
For one thing, the bipolar nature of My Fair Lady reminded me very much of the schizm today between gameplay and story in video games; that they are two completely separate types of entertainment that are expressed in opposing ways (passive versus interactive, watching versus directing, etc.) yet attempt to coexist in the same production, though most often 'take turns' as opposed to really sharing the same space at the same time. Just the same with this classic musical; a coreographed song and dance number is something completely apart from a human drama expressed through dialogue and character interaction; one interrupts the other; the entire mode of the production changes gears briefly, then reverts. You don't need to sing a song to tell a story. You don't need to play a video game to tell one either. Music is to film a valid but wholly separate form of entertainment, as film is to video games.
The logical analogue here then is that as a film musical is to the modern video game, the music is to gameplay as the story in one is to the story in the other. But that's not the gut feeling I got from the experience of watching My Fair Lady. While watching the movie, whenever a song came up, I wanted the film to get back to what it was good at-- characterization, dialogue, human interaction, not this broad song and dance. The songs got more tedious as the film went along and I just wished I could skip to the next segment where the film got to be a film instead of a stage production. And in a game, you want to skip the cutscenes, not the gameplay.
In other words, I don't think the analogy here is about the type of enjoyment derived from each element of the production (I'd say the "pure" enjoyment derived from the mechanics of well-designed gameplay riffs off a lot of the same input that makes a song with an enjoyable melody and catchy lyrics pleasurable.) I think the analogy between film musicals and narrative video games lies in both forms trying to be something they're not. My Fair Lady is emulating the stage, in a medium totally unfit for it; when video games try to be movies, they suffer for the same reasons. Gamers want to play, not watch; games aren't as good at being movies as movies are. These are games' growing pains; they will find a way to be more expressive through the gameplay itself than any static cutscene could be. I'd never realized so clearly that film went through much the same stage in the age of the gilded musical.
9.14.2006
My Fair Lady
9.07.2006
Cop Stars
After hearing some positive buzz, I downloaded the Saints Row demo from Xbox Live Marketplace. I played it for an hour or two last night. It's just what I expected-- a fairly ugly (graphically) next-gen (there's ragdolls!) clone of Grand Theft Auto 3. It copies every feature of the game, but tweaks some of the already unrealistic mechanics to make them even less convincing. For instance, where in GTA3 there was the Pay 'n' Spray, which erased your notoriety by repainting your car, Saints Row features a drivethrough "confessional," which instantly erases your notoriety without touching your car or providing any kind of rationale for why the cops no longer care that you killed a dozen of their fellow officers. Likewise, in GTA, when you are busted or sent to hospital, you lose all your weapons since, logically, they would be confiscated (though it's a big jump to believe you'd be out on the streets after your 20th consecutive arrest for mass homicide.) The mechanic is the same in Saints Row, but you get to keep your weapons. Sure it makes the game easier and more fun for players who don't like the annoyance of losing their AK when they die, but from a plausibility standpoint it just further breaks a gameworld that's already pretty far-fetched. The graphical style is completely style-less; everything looks like a bad CG render from 1998. As much of the story as I played is completely boilerplate and forgettable. "Grand Theft Auto: Worse" was the least witty but most appropriate phrase that went through my head while I was playing.
What it really made me think about was the disposability of notoriety in this type of game. You kill a few dozen people in broad daylight, you hide in an alley for 5 minutes, and it's like a global memory wipe. You get arrested, and you're back in Ammunation that afternoon buying a fresh sniper rifle. Nothing you do in the game, aside from pre-scripted missions, "matters" as far as the gameworld is concerned.
I would love to play a more low-key version of GTA. One where role-playing, as it were, impacts the experience, and matters to the gameworld. You are a criminal, maybe a hitman, but drawing attention to your crimes has a serious impact on your notoriety and the penalties you face when caught. Your goal would be to kill and steal, but to do so with cunning, so you're either not witnessed or cover up your deeds. Being arrested would be a serious penalty, and there would be separate notoriety for the police and criminal organizations; being "known" in one way could be a boon, while the other just meant you'd been sloppy.
I'd just like to play one of these games that hugged the earth a little more; blowing up a car in the middle of the financial district with a rocket launcher would make you infamous across the city, and you'd be hunted relentlessly by the police.. unless you had incredibly strong protection from the criminal underworld. I want to feel like I'm in this world, interacting with its populace, as opposed to an invincible little god of destruction who never sees any long-term repercussions to his actions. Being able to do whatever I want with no penalty acts to remove any kind of weight the gameplay itself could have. I want to have to be careful when I'm an unknown street thug, no mafia kingpins backing me up; I want to have to plan a hit and plant a bomb under my target's car, the satisfaction of getting away scot free, instead of simply lobbing grenades into a crowded street for kicks, then running for the cop star pickup to wipe my slate clean. I'm looking for Grand Theft Auto with gravity.
8.30.2006
Publication
Germany-- a great and beautiful country, or so I've heard. The glorious architecture of Berlin, the frost-tipped peaks of the majestic Alps*, the warm and friendly leiderhosen-clad country folk. And BENEATH.
That's right, at the end of September, you will be able to find all of these things in Germany.** BENEATH is scheduled to appear on the coverdisc of September's issue of PC ACTION magazine, probably Germany's leading PC gaming publication!
I'm psyched to have my map show up on newsstands and in subscribers' mailboxes across the great country of Germany. This will be the first official publication of one of my maps in a legit print enterprise, which is exciting in and of itself. But for BENEATH to glide into the hands of millions of genuinely wonderful German citizens, courtesy of that fine nation's leading PC gaming publication PC ACTION magazine? I just couldn't be happier.
Confidential to Germans: sorry in advance for the green blood or whatever. I swear when I made the map those guys weren't robots.
*possibly not in Germany
**possibly
8.27.2006
ModDB
Welcome, visitors from ModDB!
You know, it took me a while to think of putting BENEATH on ModDB. I'd never really thought of the level as a 'mod' per se. But, I guess that a single-player map, that has its own story, and stands apart from the original single player game, is a sort of mini-mod. Not a total conversion, or really any sort of conversion, but a modification nonetheless. If Minerva is a mod, then BENEATH is, too.
To the ModDBers, thanks for stopping by. This blog probably won't be of any huge interest, though there's a little of the process and behind-the-scenes info here and there. Download mirrors are below if you missed them, and I hope you enjoy BENEATH.
As far as the rest of the below post goes, let's hope I spoke too soon :-)
8.21.2006
Release
The final version of BENEATH has been uploaded to the following download mirrors:
FEARMaps
FileCloud
FileFront
FilePlanet
3DDownloads
I made the opening more user-friendly and tweaked a few things. Everything, I believe, is just how I want it.
This morning, I announced the release of this map on a few message boards I visit, including the official VUG modding board, and the SA Games forum. I'm surprised that there really hasn't been any response in the threads at all. Are people just not interested in single-player maps? Am I aiming at the wrong audience? I haven't been able to find a solid general mapping community site. There are sites based on specific engines, such as Unreal sites or Source sites, but no "mappers' haven" that I've come across to just generally talk about mapping and level design and share your work regardless of engine. The only place I've gotten any response-- which was positive, granted-- was on www.fearmaps.com. I appreciated the feedback from the forumgoers there, but I just wonder... how does a mapper get the word out about their work, and get involved with a community? Especially when they're working with an engine that doesn't have a huge amount of fan support behind it?
It's not that I made the map for the attention it would give me. My work with WorldEdit started out as a self-driven desire to make my own single-player scenario for one of my favorite new games. Then it turned into a desire to do well in that FilePlanet contest, once that was announced. But after the contest, turning Residential Evil into BENEATH has been nothing but a labor of love, as it were. I just loved the gameplay of FEAR, and couldn't think of another game I'd rather make a single-player adventure for... and there it was, an SDK with the capability of making single-player content, right there, for free! I've enjoyed working with WorldEdit immensely, and I'm personally satisfied with the results I've come up with... but now that it's finished, it would be nice for more people to see and enjoy the actual product.
I feel like this is the way every one of my personal projects has gone. All the comics I did in high school and college had distribution that you could count on one hand. The webcomic I put 9 months of work into managed to garner about 15 fans. The Journal, while again another project I was personally very satisfied with, managed to move about 10 copies per issue. It served its purpose-- I got to write about something I really cared for, got paid freelance work out of it, and got to contact a number of my game industry heroes in the process-- but still, personal drive can only get you so far. Wouldn't it be nice for someone else to appreciate the work? I don't know. I just can't seem to get the word out.
I think I'm bad at publicity.
8.18.2006
Candidate
Okay, so!
I have what I'd call a release candidate of BENEATH prepared and ready to install! If you are somehow reading this, but haven't already been contacted by me to test the map, download it...
HERE
It's an auto-installer that provides a shortcut to run FEAR with the BENEATH module enabled. Just start a new game after launching the BENEATH shortcut.
If you play this, give me feedback: steve.gaynor@gmail.com
I'll throw in a couple of screenshots while I'm at it, to remind you what this is all about:
"This level is not considered a prequel, sequel, or continuation of the original game's story, but a "what if?" What if F.E.A.R. were a tiny, inexperienced agency, whose existence was based entirely on the whim of an eccentric Army general who'd begun to take wartime ghost stories a little too seriously? What if F.E.A.R. primarily investigated "anomalous" incidents-- flukes, rumors-- that no other agency cared to waste their time on? What if the F.E.A.R. crew never expected to stumble across any significant threats while chasing shadows... and then suddenly, they did?
Coincidentally, recruit, it's your first night on the job. And you think you're in for a walk in the park."
I am fairly confident this will be the final version, but we'll see. Let me know what you think :-)
8.07.2006
System sellers
Since I started buying my own game consoles, I've always waited to pick up any given hardware until a game comes out, specific to that system, that I can't resist playing.
My parents bought me my NES and SNES when I was young, and I think I just wanted them for games in general. But I bought my own Playstation, and if I remember correctly, I, like so many people my age at the time, bought the PS1 "for" Final Fantasy 7. With the Dreamcast, I didn't buy one until ridiculously late in its lifespan, and for some reason it was for Phantasy Star Online. I think I really liked the character designs, and might have been attracted to it being online. But the game didn't end up being fun or engaging. On the upside, I did finally buy a nice backlog of Dreamcast games, but that was probably one system I wouldn't have missed if I'd skipped it. Again, I picked up the PS2 for a popular choice: Grand Theft Auto 3. This one was worth it for the game itself, and well as all the PS2 games that followed it; the Metal Gear Solids, the Katamaris, the Shadows of the Colossi and the rest.
Now I've been sold an Xbox 360, and the game that sold it was Dead Rising. Like other system sellers, it will only appear on its native system for the forseeable future, the gameplay it offers can't be found anywhere else, and it has a bunch of elements I'm hugely interested in. I love beat'em ups, I love games set in the 'real world,' I love games that give you free reign over the environment, I love games where you can pick up just about anything and toss it around, and I find games that are inherently short and encourage multiple playthroughs to "re-see" the narrative a really interesting approach to pacing and exploration. I've been playing the Dead Rising demo on my new 360 for a couple days now, and it looks amazing, and is huge fun to play. I'm looking forward to digging into the story and character elements of the game when it's released this week. As far as system sellers, I think this one's already made itself worthwhile.
Now that I think of it, the Wii won't need a system selling game for me. The hardware sells itself. And no game is going to sell me a PS3; that thing is a million dollars and the 360 seems like it has stolen most of their exclusives. But for now, Dead Rising has earned the 360 its place on my shelf.
7.31.2006
Checklist
BENEATH is almost finished. I'm going to estimate it's got another couple weeks til completion. Then I want to test it myself and with a couple people I know for a little while before I release it publicly.
To do:
- Finalize and record spoken dialogue
- Script in vocal/story sequences, including opening sequence and useable laptop objects
- Create and script in onscreen text elements (titles, credits)
I'm excited. I'm really happy with the map itself. I think it's a tightly constructed space, and I have fun with the gameplay experience (even though I'm already pretty jaded towards the actual layout and encounters... a lot of the basic stuff has been in and working for a relatively long time.)
This stuff coming up is going to be fun and easy. I'm looking forward to it.
7.22.2006
Japanese
The number of current-gen releases is dying out, but there are a few PS2 games coming down the pipe yet that I've got my eye on. One is Yakuza, an extremely by-the-numbers Japanese mob story told through a city-roaming street brawler game. On one hand, I'm delighted that it managed to make it over to the States in the first place, since it's so tightly tied to Japanese culture in every respect. The game takes place in Japan, all the names are kept Japanese, the structure and customs of the Japanese mafia are central to the game, and pretty dense to keep straight, what with untranslated terms like "oyabun" being tossed around freely. Like many great yakuza epics, such as, say, Kinji Fukusaku's "Yakuza Papers," the character dynamics and relationships between the various yakuza families are almost too dense and complex to ably track, to the point that the game, humorously enough, includes a chart accessible from the start menu to remind you who's the oyabun of which family, and what that family's relationship is to every other family, and so forth.
Which brings me to my point. This game is very Japanese in every respect. I'm impressed that Sega believes there's an American audience for this kind of enterprise, culturally inaccessible as it may be on some level. Which is what disappoints me, annoys me, actually, about their decision to dub the entire game over with English language voice actors. I played the demo of Yakuza this week, which still had all the Japanese voices in (as well as a disclaimer stating that the full game will feature all-English voices.) The Japanese cast was simply terrific, and I couldn't think of a game where the native Japanese voices could possibly be more appropriate. It made me really disgusted to picture the same game, but with Eliza Dushku and Michael Madsen awkward Japanese pronunciation popping up between lines of a rewritten English script.
What bothers me about it is how inappropriate the decision seems. I expect the idea was to help broaden the appeal of the game by removing the need for subtitles (Sega states in the interview above that they wanted to include the Japanese voice track as well, but didn't have room on the disc.) But this game is one that defies broad appeal by its very nature. It's integrally foreign in every regard, from the setting to the plot to the character's names; to deny the game its original foreign voice fundamentally opposes the experience the game is built on. It's doubtful that an English voice cast, even with known Hollywood names attached, will draw in players who wouldn't be interested in the game otherwise; who asks about subtitles when they're buying a game?
When a publisher decides to bring a game like Yakuza overseas, I wish they would just pony up and go 100%. This is a game that's going to appeal to a niche of players who either love Japanese culture or are looking for something out of the norm; why diminish the total experience in the interest of drawing in a non-existent middleground of consumers? Disappointing.
7.04.2006
Hitman
Hitman: Blood Money. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the best game I've played in... six months? A year? I'm a longtime Hitman fan, ever since playing the pre-release demo for the first game of the series in late 2000. My friends and I absolutely fell in love with Hitman: Codename 47. Due to the nonlinearity and massive replayability of each of the levels, we spent over six months playing the game on a near daily basis, re-exploring and pushing the boundaries of Lee Hong's compound and the hotel in Traditions of the Trade over and over again. When we discovered the slow-motion, freecam, and giveall cheats, the game's lifespan was extended another six months. Codename 47's engine brought a bunch of revolutionary touches together for the first time-- features like ragdolls physics (which were meaningful to the gameplay through the body-dragging mechanic) dynamically shifting cloth banners and foliage that reacted to the player's movement, glass that dynamically shattered and fell, persistent bullet holes on both world surfaces as well as characters, and more. Together with a unique spin on stealth gameplay-- more like infiltration, really-- and freeform levels you could replay individually from the title menu at any time, Codename 47 was truly unique, something I'd never seen before.
But I digress. Hitman 2 and Contracts lost a lot of the strengths of the first game, making the play more restrictive, turning the enemy AI into a frustrating mess, and skimping on the graphical touches. For years I was on a disappointment yo-yo, get psyched for Hitman 2 before being horribly disappointed, getting my hopes up for Contracts only to lose faith in the series again. Finally, during the lead-up to Blood Money, I started to hear a lot of exciting info on the Games forum. I couldn't help but get hyped up once more for another Hitman game, reluctant as I was. And to my surpise, and great relief, this was the one they got right. It brought back the magic of the first game, and added so much more. Incredibly, it was worth waiting 6 years for.
The good stuff in the game is the breadth of missions and the amazing environments that IO has built; what makes the game great is the way that IO opened up the play, giving 47 more abilities, and therefore the player more leeway in accomplishing his goals. 47 can now throw items, which opens up a whole range of possible offensive and passive actions, such as tossing a mine over a wall and setting it off, throwing your equipment into a guard's field of view to draw his attention, or simply throwing a knife at a dude to take him out. 47 also has new ways to get up close and personal, using melee attacks and human shield grabs. The ability to push NPCs around, shoving them over railings and down stairs to set up accidents, is another hilariously useful addition. There are more ways to do any given thing, and more Plan B's available when things get hairy. Essentially, the designers implemented a more robust set of affordances to the game, in the form of new actions that 47 can perform, and new types of items for him and the NPCs to interact with. Instead of the limited inputs of "shoot or strangle" as in the earlier games, 47 can affect the world more subtly by throwing objects around it, and the AI reacts more robustly by taking these objects into account and reacting to them. Similarly, 47 can now affect NPCs more directly but less overtly, by pushing them or grabbing them as human shields, to move them around the level. To use another Word, the player is given more agency in how he wants to approach each mission by the gameplay's range of affordances, leading to a more nuanced and satisfying experience. Put the rich gameplay and lush environments together with a tightly-constructed but unintrusive tale of political intrigue, and you've got a game that grabs you and just won't let go. It's outstanding. Simply outstanding.
One thing I've seen people say often about the Hitman series is that they're not action or stealth games, so much as puzzle games. This springs from the fact that all of the NPCs behave in an identical, clockwork fashion each time the player starts up any given level. If Guard A walks through Door X at the :25 mark on your first run, he'll walk through Door X at the :25 mark on your second run and third and thousandth. Barring player disruption, the actions of every character in every map and the patterns they create will be exactly the same every time. This encourages one approach of devising "perfect" playthroughs by observing the level, reading the predictable patterns, and then finding a way to time your own actions right so as to slip between the gears of the clockwork and accomplish your mission. Someone described the experience as similar to being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but to much different ends. It's an apt comparison, and it's one of the weakest points of a game that I still love regardless.
What I'd like to see in the Hitman framework is something a little less predictable. Currently, NPCs have a series of nodes that they path to in a single, consistent pattern. Say that a man has four nodes: his sofa, the bar in his kitchen, the swimming pool, and the shower. He sits in the sofa, gets up to go to the bar, takes a quick swim, showers off, and sits back down on his sofa. He repeats this forever. I propose a slight alteration to this scheme. Each NPC still has a limited total number of nodes that they path to, but it's not in a static sequence. Instead, each node relates to each other node through a variety of properties that determine the likelihood of pathing to any given node when he leaves his prior node. So, in the above example, if the man starts out at his sofa, he might have an equal likelihood of going to the bar or the swimming pool; his likelihood of going to the shower from the sofa might be extremely small, or nonexistent. Since the chance of going to the bar or pool is equal, the destination is chosen at random. From the time he leaves the sofa, both the sofa node and swimming pool node start to build priority; the rate of priority gain can be set for each node. When the NPC reaches any given node, its priority is reset to zero. So, from the beginning of the level both the bar node and swimming pool node begin building priority; when he leaves the sofa, its priority begins to rise; when he arrives at the bar, its priority is reset to zero. When he leaves the bar, the swimming pool, which has been gaining priority longest, is first choice for the NPC.
Now, to keep this from turning into a more complicated system of achieving the same results, some randomizing factors come into play. One: for an NPC that has three or more nodes, the NPC randomly approaches one of the two nodes with highest priority. So in this case, he might go to the swimming pool, or he might return to the sofa. Additionally, some NPCs share nodes. So if someone is already on the sofa, he will be forced to go to the swimming pool. When an NPC has half a dozen or more nodes, and he shares these with multiple, other NPCs, you can see how his patterns would become much less predictable.
The point is, this guy gets up and goes to the bar. Then does he go back to the sofa, or to the swimming pool? Let's say he hits the pool. He swims for a bit, then he's hardwired to hit the shower after the pool. Then what? He either returns to the bar or the sofa. Then what? I find this much more interesting and exciting than knowing that he will move from sofa to bar to pool to shower to sofa in a neverending loop.
This is a simple example, but my goal is to maintain some predicatability--the range of possible locations and actions for any given NPC is limited-- but make the NPC behavior in the game dynamic in nature, instead of static. The gameplay then becomes a matter of observing NPCs, determining all their possible actions, and then adapting your approach to fit what they might do. Predicting their location and your own options becomes a matter of reasoning and improvisation instead of memorization. It also ups the tension, because you can't be absolutely sure who might be coming around the corner at any given time. It changes each map from a static, predictable, and therefore gratingly artificial and eventually boring clockwork, to a box of low-key controlled chaos. Dynamism. Tension. Improvisation. Fluidity.
Another jarring aspect of the gameplay in Blood Money--and this goes for many stealth games as well-- is the absolute conviction with which NPCs stick to their predetermined routines, even following extreme disturbances. This is most apparent in the levels that take place in a smaller, more residential setting, such as A New Life or Til Death Do Us Part. You can set off a mine in the middle of the dancefloor or snipe the groom at the wedding, and after an initial freakout, all the NPCs will go back to their normal routines. You can burn the wife to death in A New Life and within 5 minutes the husband will be back to nonchalantly watching TV in the front room. It's completely unrealistic and weird. If half the party guest at my wedding got blown up by a mysterious bomb, do you think I'd be up at the altar 15 minutes later?
What I propose are "standard" and "panic" positions. Standard position is the set of nodes and behaviors that NPCs on the map initially use. Panic position is engaged after a major disturbance-- when an explosion happens, when gunfire is detected, when an important NPC is killed. Panic position engages a secondary set of nodes and behaviors more consistent with a state of great duress, which continues for the rest of the mission. So in A New Life, if the husband was sniped through the front window, the wife would gain new nodes: crying by her husband's body, hiding in her room, and taking swigs from the bar; the guards on the map would fan out to cover the area more vigilantly; the hired help would leave the area. On Til Death Do Us Part, after a major disturbance such as an explosion, the father of the bride might hole up in his room with his gun in the ready position, while the groom might go aggro and begin searching the grounds for the perpetrator. The bride would hide in her room with a number of her bridesmaids. The guards would go on more active search patrols. Again, this would make each mission more dynamic, as the entire place has two possible states, determined by the player's actions; along with the more dynamic system of NPC desire nodes, all but the highest level predictability is eliminated, giving the player a different experience each time they enter a level, and removing the somewhat robotic feel of the missions. Working towards dynamism and a system of strictly controlled chaos-- knowing what could happen, but never being SURE-- would push an already hugely enjoyable game to a whole new level.
Let's see what IO does with the next in the series :-)