"Take it from me!"

I want to thank you for all the hours of entertainment you have provided.  I know that you work very long hours to bring me the best entertainment that you can.  I just have a couple of things I would love to see tweaked or changed (and by a couple I mean 7).

1. Space Marines

I am not saying they need to disappear entirely (lord knows they are the backbone of our interstellar defense), but there is a potential for depth that video games have not matched.  I think back to the novel “Starship Troopers” (NOT the movie) and the way that Heinlein handled the idea of a soldier in an interstellar war.  The action was just backdrop to a much deeper discussion about the military and what it meant to be a soldier.  There hasn’t been a game that has come close to truly examining what it would be like to be a space soldier.

In space, the feeling of vast emptiness should be palpable.  Gravity should play a huge role in how you maneuver and fight.  Picture a battle taking place over some gas giant planet. Silent explosions send shrapnel flying in all directions.  You and your squad launch from your ship in full power armor.  The only sound you hear comes over your com-channel as you float through the endless void.  The ship you just launched from explodes in a massive, but eerily silent blast.  The shockwave knocks you off course. You scramble to adjust your thrusters as the gas giant looms large, it’s gravity well threatening to suck you in.  Your only hope is to correct your course and use your magnetic hook to grapple onto an enemy ship.  Do you save your squad-mates, or do you let them tumble away into a burning death?  Save them and they can help you take over the ship, fail and hear them scream over the com as they plummet to their death.

The closest I can think of to a game really playing with gravity at all was Prey, which enabled you to walk on walls and ceilings at certain points.  I think that a zero-g environment could open up hundreds of new game play strategies.  Picture a multiplayer zero-g shooter with teams working together to push and maneuver each other to victory.  The mere act of shooting changes your momentum and direction so you have to work with your teammates in all kinds of new ways.  I envision a beautiful ballet of explosions and death.  Please make this happen.

2. World War II

Hey, I love WWII as much as the next American. It’s the war that gave us Captain America, for crying out loud.  I understand how appealing it is to have ready made villains like the Nazis.  I get it.

I just think that with this new generation of consoles we are bound only by our imaginations.  Storming the beaches at Normandy is a crazy, intense experience that I loved the first 82 times I did it.  Why can’t we do something different?  There is no rule that says shooters have to follow along with the script of history.  In fact I think that by using our imaginations we could easily come up with new scenarios.  And I don’t mean just taking the “Resistance” route and saying WWII never happened cause aliens are attacking.  I mean we could come up with plausible realistic scenarios that could offer something beyond the simple WWII formula.

I think that war is a much more complex undertaking than video games have really portrayed.  In war, there is not usually a clearly definable idea of who is right and who is wrong.  In most cases the lines are blurred to the point that right and wrong become meaningless.  We have had enough “Ra, Ra go America” games.  What about a game where America is the invading country?  Picture the end of the Korean war, but instead of stopping the advance, America continues to push into China.  You are a soldier on the front lines as American troops surge through China.  You are the invader.  You are the one taking out troops as they try to defend their homes.  Is this war even right?  You are there to free people that don’t want to be freed, who are killing and dying to stop you.  I think that this could open up whole new realms of thought and discussion.

This is just one scenario I came up with, there are literally limitless possibilities.  With so much potential for creativity, why fall back on the same thing over and over again?

3. Boobs

Hey I love Boobs more than just about anybody, but I think that if gaming ever wants to be taken seriously we need to try to get away from the unrealistic female figure that pops up in almost every game.  I just think about the girls who come into our store that are looking for a game.  Most of the games that are made for girls are stuff like “Barbie Island Princess” or “Bratz,” which are fine when you are 5, but what about when girls grow up?  Getting away from kids games, we find that most women in gaming look like they were designed by 12-year old boys.  Look at the girls in “DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball.”  The women in this game must have solid steel spines to be able to support those things.

Let’s face it, most female characters are designed to be adolescent male fantasies, which is why they have enormous boobs.  It is the same in comic books. Look at a character like Power Girl from DC Comics.  These characters are not meant to be role models for women.  They are meant to be eye candy.  I am not trying to get all preachy or anything, because I think that there is a place for the games like DOA.  I just wish that there were more games that I wouldn’t be ashamed to show my little sister.

The thing is, it makes good business sense.  There is a definite market for games with strong female leads.  How many girls and women love the “Legend of Zelda” games?  I cannot tell you how many girls come into our store looking for Zelda games.  A properly made Zelda style game with a strong female lead, one that has just a bit of marketing behind it, has the potential to kick serious A.  “Beyond Good and Evil” had the right idea, and everyone that played it seems to agree that it is amazing, but BGE had pretty much no marketing behind it.

4. AI

AI means artificial intelligence, but far too many games forget the intelligence part of the equation.  Even some of the best games of all time rely on enemies having improved accuracy rather than increased intelligence.  A game like “Call of Duty” doesn’t have crazy intelligent enemies, it’s not like they are using intelligent tactics and maneuvers.  Instead the game makes the enemies all crack shots.  This is just lazy programming.

5. Save points

I have just sat through 30 minutes of dialog.  After defeating a boss that took 45 minutes to kill.  I was supposed to have left for work 5 minutes ago, and I have no idea when the next save is coming up, so I am faced with the choice, pause and leave the system on all day or turn it off and redo the hour and fifteen minutes I already played.

THIS IS THE YEAR 2009!

We are in the future.  I have resigned myself to the fact that I don’t have a hoverboard. I can live without my robot butler, but I refuse to accept that I can’t save my game anywhere.  I don’t care if I am in the middle of a boss battle, I should be able to save my game.  The reason we couldn’t save anywhere in the old days was due more to technical limits than planned design choices.  At this point, limiting where we can save is ridiculous.  With our crazy future technology, there is no need for this save point garbage.  Games should have checkpoints, where the game automatically saves, and there should be the option to save anywhere, anytime.

6. Physics

Video games have made amazing strides when it comes to graphics.  The cars in “Gran Turismo: Prologue” look arguably better than they do in real life.  “Mass Effect” has such realistic facial movements that you can tell when characters are happy or sad.  These are just a couple of examples of the fantastic ways in which games have advanced.  This is due to the fact that computer processing has reached a point that once seemed like pure science fiction.  Weird words like “teraflop” have entered into our lexicon.  These machines are a billion times more advanced than the computers that we used to get to the moon.  Why then can’t I shoot through a couch?  Why can’t I use my bazooka to blow a hole in that wall?  I have the ability to summon a space dragon to come down and through a meteor at my enemies, but I can’t kick a door down.

If you were watching a movie or reading a book and the main character went from being almost god like in their power to suddenly being unable to get past a simple obstacle what would your reaction be?  Would you just accept it?  Or would you laugh as the hero tracks down some key?

These artificial barriers take gamers out of the fantastic worlds. I realize that there is a limited budget when it comes to making games.  Developers could always do more if they had more money or time.  So when faced with the choice, between working on making the prettiest game they can versus improving the physics, all too often the choice is graphics.  Which seems odd to me since physics have far more to do with game-play than graphics.

7. Tutorials

I scream every single time a game tries to tell me how to look up and down.  I yell every time they tell me how to duck.  I throw things every time they tell me how to walk.  I beat Call of Duty World at War on veteran, I made Sephiroth lick my boots. I know how to get to the minus world for goodness sake.  WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME HOW TO DO BASIC COMMANDS?

Please stop starting out every shooter with a tutorial.  Please stop starting every strategy game with a tutorial.  If I can’t figure out how to walk around and shoot things, I shouldn’t be playing.  If I can’t figure out that my Archers have a longer attack range than my Warriors then my army deserves to be crushed.

“Tomb Raider” showed you the way to handle tutorials over a dozen years ago.  “Tomb Raider” had Lara’s Mansion as one of the options on the start menu, if you were new to the series and wanted to find out the games concepts and controls, you could go there and the game would explain everything.  The game didn’t force you to sit through explanations of how to walk and shoot but those explanations were there, if you needed it.

No game should start with “Alright marine look up, now down.”  Simply set up a training option at the start menu and everyone can be happy.

And those are my couple ( 7 ) suggestions for stuff I would love to see.

Tags: AI, Captain America, Editorials, physics, save points, space marines, tutorials, World War II

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.