Just picked up F.E.A.R. 3 on my way home today. Could have sworn the release date was tomorrow. I'm not complaining though, this is good news! I'm not sure what to expect from this game as I really don't know much about it at all, I hope it's good, though. A review should be up in the next few days.
Edit: Seems I'm not allowed to install it yet as it isn't released according to Steam. I suppose the store I bought it at got the release date wrong. Oh well.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
14 years in the making: Duke Nukem Forever review
It's always good news when the controls listed in the manual assumes you are using an Xbox 360-controller.
I didn't have any high expectations at all when it came to Duke Nukem Forever. Ever since I got to know that the game would use regenerating health and a maximum capacity of two carried weapons, I knew something was wrong. I even wrote a long article that you may or may not have read about these two issues.
I do have good news though! Duke Nukem Forever was not at all as crippled by these design decisions as I originally had thought. I played through the game on the hardest difficulty you could choose without have beaten the game already, and while it was a pain in the ass to die so quickly in the early stages of the game, it got way better later on. Sure, some fights were hell, where you had to take cover to avoid an onslaught of rockets or similar, but the game felt way more run and gun-ish that I thought it would.
The two weapon limitation doesn't feel all that bad either. Sure, some weapons like the freeze ray and shrink ray might as well not be in the game - I only used each weapon once, and that was the very first time I ran into them. I would much rather have any other weapon in the game than one of those. Some other weapons are rendered quite obsolete as they are quite rare, and you at least won't be carrying them for longer moments, but it's not nearly as bad as with the two ray-weapons.
Does this mean I think Duke Nukem Forever is a good game then? I mean, my two biggest fears turned out to not be all that bad. Well, no. Not at all. I have written in another article how shooters with heavy emphasis on cover (DNF doesn't have this though) need to do extraordinarily well in other aspects, such as environments, animations, weapons, you name it. This doesn't make shooters more action-oriented immune from this though.
Duke Nukem Forever is a game that should have spent more time (ha-ha) on such aspects, like the weapons, environments, animations and so on. First of all, the weapons feel weak. The single weapon in the entire game that doesn't feel like a toy gun is the shotgun, but it doesn't feel much better than that either. And it certainly doesn't help that it has an effective range of about two meters.
The environments are just as bland as the weapons feel weak. Most of the game consists of linear corridors, and while there is some variation in the environments, none of them look good. Ugly textures exactly everywhere ruin what could have been slightly interesting environments, and you can't help but wish things looked different.
The same issue plagues all the characters in the game. Every character you will run across has absolutely awfully textured, and to add to that, at least the enemies' animations are among the worst I've seen in years. Their AI isn't particularly good either, as I've seen Pigcops get stuck on walls, and even air, slashing at seemingly nothing. It should be added that this was more frequent in early levels.
Duke Nukem Forever is deserving of its 18+ rating. It's filled with breasts, drugs, profanity and violence. This connects to another problem with the interaction with The Duke's enemies. While you will find more and more dismembered and mutilated corpses the further in the game you get, and you can find your enemies' corpses limbless and elseways brutally slaughtered if you happen to look at them after a fight, but it's hardly noticeable during the actual gunfights.
It's a really, really weird feeling to be spraying 20+ bullets into a Pigcop, without noticing any sort of blood spray at all, when the game is quite violent indeed in other ways. I do know that there, at least sometimes, sprays blood from enemies when shot, because I managed to see it a couple or three times during the campaign. It still doesn't change the fact that I could hardly see any of it, though.
Duke Nukem Forever features several gimmicks as well. First of all, there is the ability to execute some enemies to regain your Ego instantly. This might just as well have been left out. There's an achievement to get 20 executions in single-player, and I managed to get it on the level just before the ending boss, finishing the game with a total of 21 executions. None of them were needed to save my life either.
There's also the Holoduke, but I couldn't tell you how it works. I not once used it during my entire playthrough of the campaign. The Duke also has the ability to use Steroids to instagib most enemies with one melee attack, although he is only working at 75% of maximum health capacity. This is used on some of the first enemies of the game before all hell breaks loose, and I also used it on one boss together with the beer when I became desperate. The beer blurs The Duke's vision, and makes him much more resilient. Besides said boss, I used this item once later on, where I found it useful.
The Duke also manages to increase his maximum health pool by doing certain things, like defeating bosses, winning a game of air-hockey, and various other things. I found most of these opportunities to increase your health during the parts of the game where you socialize with other humans, with no aliens nearby. This is also a negative thing with Duke Nukem Forever. Judging from an achievement, there are 100 of these things you can accomplish to increase your health, but almost all of them are complete time-wasters, only necessary to help you survive.
Besides air-hockey, you can play a bad version of whack-a-mole, a bad version of pool with the worst physics I've seen, Duke Nukem 3D included, a bad version of poker and a slot machine. The pool and the slot machine mini games were so ridiculously boring and a waste of time that I skipped them. On lower difficulties, you can probably skip more, if not most of these annoying game-lengtheners.
That's basically what they are, stupid things that don't add anything at all to the gameplay, but take time, thus making the overall experience last longer. The same goes for the two areas where you won't see any combat. I spent at least one and a half hour in these meaningless areas. The first hour of the game for me was like this, but it will be much quicker if you don't insist on checking out almost everything. This means you'll lose out on max HP, though.
The second are is one in The Duke's fantasies, where he goes on a quest to find a few items in his strip club to get a private lap dance. I believe I spent half an hour here, trying to increase my max HP among other things. This, too, could be removed from the game without any harm done, as all it does is annoy, drag out the game length, and perhaps turn on a few teenagers who shouldn't be playing this game anyways.
All these elements add up to Duke Nukem Forever's biggest problem. It's boring. Simple as that: the game is a total snoozefest. After seeing my first combat around an hour into the game, I wanted the game to come to its end after a total of two hours play time. Few games I've played during the latest years have been this boring. The combat is boring, the minigames are annoying, the graphics are ugly, and the humor and style are..? Well, I appreciate the style Duke Nukem 3D has, but I would say that Duke Nukem Forever is suffering from a case of trying too hard. Five minutes into the game I had heard enough of it to become bored, although some of the oneliners made me smile later into the game as well.
That doesn't change the fact that if this title wasn't a Duke Nukem game, no one would buy it, no one would pay attention to it, and no one would remember it a week after its release. A completely anonymous and forgettable experience that you wish would end a bit quicker.
The most entertaining parts of the entire game for me was none of the things you'd expect a Duke Nukem game to be great at. The most joy, or at least the least boredom I got from this title was one of the two major driving sections, namely the part where one got to drive a monstertruck, because behind the wheel I wouldn't have to suffer the drowsing combat nor the terrible textures up close. And that says a bit about a FPS.
The game took me about 7 hours to get to the credits, all loading screens, deaths and cut scenes included. I died a total of 35 times during the playthrough. The multiplayer aspect of the game might as well not be there, and you will most likely have a hard time finding a game in a week. It's lazily done with a maximum of 8 players and no dedicated servers that I know of. At the most I've seen five games up, and as of writing I managed to find one active game in the browser.
Pick this game from the bargain bin if you manage to find a copy there, or rent it over a weekend. I can't recommend a purchase even to the most die-hard Duke Nukem fan.
4/10
I didn't have any high expectations at all when it came to Duke Nukem Forever. Ever since I got to know that the game would use regenerating health and a maximum capacity of two carried weapons, I knew something was wrong. I even wrote a long article that you may or may not have read about these two issues.
I do have good news though! Duke Nukem Forever was not at all as crippled by these design decisions as I originally had thought. I played through the game on the hardest difficulty you could choose without have beaten the game already, and while it was a pain in the ass to die so quickly in the early stages of the game, it got way better later on. Sure, some fights were hell, where you had to take cover to avoid an onslaught of rockets or similar, but the game felt way more run and gun-ish that I thought it would.
The two weapon limitation doesn't feel all that bad either. Sure, some weapons like the freeze ray and shrink ray might as well not be in the game - I only used each weapon once, and that was the very first time I ran into them. I would much rather have any other weapon in the game than one of those. Some other weapons are rendered quite obsolete as they are quite rare, and you at least won't be carrying them for longer moments, but it's not nearly as bad as with the two ray-weapons.
Does this mean I think Duke Nukem Forever is a good game then? I mean, my two biggest fears turned out to not be all that bad. Well, no. Not at all. I have written in another article how shooters with heavy emphasis on cover (DNF doesn't have this though) need to do extraordinarily well in other aspects, such as environments, animations, weapons, you name it. This doesn't make shooters more action-oriented immune from this though.
Duke Nukem Forever is a game that should have spent more time (ha-ha) on such aspects, like the weapons, environments, animations and so on. First of all, the weapons feel weak. The single weapon in the entire game that doesn't feel like a toy gun is the shotgun, but it doesn't feel much better than that either. And it certainly doesn't help that it has an effective range of about two meters.
The environments are just as bland as the weapons feel weak. Most of the game consists of linear corridors, and while there is some variation in the environments, none of them look good. Ugly textures exactly everywhere ruin what could have been slightly interesting environments, and you can't help but wish things looked different.
The same issue plagues all the characters in the game. Every character you will run across has absolutely awfully textured, and to add to that, at least the enemies' animations are among the worst I've seen in years. Their AI isn't particularly good either, as I've seen Pigcops get stuck on walls, and even air, slashing at seemingly nothing. It should be added that this was more frequent in early levels.
Duke Nukem Forever is deserving of its 18+ rating. It's filled with breasts, drugs, profanity and violence. This connects to another problem with the interaction with The Duke's enemies. While you will find more and more dismembered and mutilated corpses the further in the game you get, and you can find your enemies' corpses limbless and elseways brutally slaughtered if you happen to look at them after a fight, but it's hardly noticeable during the actual gunfights.
It's a really, really weird feeling to be spraying 20+ bullets into a Pigcop, without noticing any sort of blood spray at all, when the game is quite violent indeed in other ways. I do know that there, at least sometimes, sprays blood from enemies when shot, because I managed to see it a couple or three times during the campaign. It still doesn't change the fact that I could hardly see any of it, though.
Duke Nukem Forever features several gimmicks as well. First of all, there is the ability to execute some enemies to regain your Ego instantly. This might just as well have been left out. There's an achievement to get 20 executions in single-player, and I managed to get it on the level just before the ending boss, finishing the game with a total of 21 executions. None of them were needed to save my life either.
There's also the Holoduke, but I couldn't tell you how it works. I not once used it during my entire playthrough of the campaign. The Duke also has the ability to use Steroids to instagib most enemies with one melee attack, although he is only working at 75% of maximum health capacity. This is used on some of the first enemies of the game before all hell breaks loose, and I also used it on one boss together with the beer when I became desperate. The beer blurs The Duke's vision, and makes him much more resilient. Besides said boss, I used this item once later on, where I found it useful.
The Duke also manages to increase his maximum health pool by doing certain things, like defeating bosses, winning a game of air-hockey, and various other things. I found most of these opportunities to increase your health during the parts of the game where you socialize with other humans, with no aliens nearby. This is also a negative thing with Duke Nukem Forever. Judging from an achievement, there are 100 of these things you can accomplish to increase your health, but almost all of them are complete time-wasters, only necessary to help you survive.
Besides air-hockey, you can play a bad version of whack-a-mole, a bad version of pool with the worst physics I've seen, Duke Nukem 3D included, a bad version of poker and a slot machine. The pool and the slot machine mini games were so ridiculously boring and a waste of time that I skipped them. On lower difficulties, you can probably skip more, if not most of these annoying game-lengtheners.
That's basically what they are, stupid things that don't add anything at all to the gameplay, but take time, thus making the overall experience last longer. The same goes for the two areas where you won't see any combat. I spent at least one and a half hour in these meaningless areas. The first hour of the game for me was like this, but it will be much quicker if you don't insist on checking out almost everything. This means you'll lose out on max HP, though.
The second are is one in The Duke's fantasies, where he goes on a quest to find a few items in his strip club to get a private lap dance. I believe I spent half an hour here, trying to increase my max HP among other things. This, too, could be removed from the game without any harm done, as all it does is annoy, drag out the game length, and perhaps turn on a few teenagers who shouldn't be playing this game anyways.
All these elements add up to Duke Nukem Forever's biggest problem. It's boring. Simple as that: the game is a total snoozefest. After seeing my first combat around an hour into the game, I wanted the game to come to its end after a total of two hours play time. Few games I've played during the latest years have been this boring. The combat is boring, the minigames are annoying, the graphics are ugly, and the humor and style are..? Well, I appreciate the style Duke Nukem 3D has, but I would say that Duke Nukem Forever is suffering from a case of trying too hard. Five minutes into the game I had heard enough of it to become bored, although some of the oneliners made me smile later into the game as well.
That doesn't change the fact that if this title wasn't a Duke Nukem game, no one would buy it, no one would pay attention to it, and no one would remember it a week after its release. A completely anonymous and forgettable experience that you wish would end a bit quicker.
The most entertaining parts of the entire game for me was none of the things you'd expect a Duke Nukem game to be great at. The most joy, or at least the least boredom I got from this title was one of the two major driving sections, namely the part where one got to drive a monstertruck, because behind the wheel I wouldn't have to suffer the drowsing combat nor the terrible textures up close. And that says a bit about a FPS.
The game took me about 7 hours to get to the credits, all loading screens, deaths and cut scenes included. I died a total of 35 times during the playthrough. The multiplayer aspect of the game might as well not be there, and you will most likely have a hard time finding a game in a week. It's lazily done with a maximum of 8 players and no dedicated servers that I know of. At the most I've seen five games up, and as of writing I managed to find one active game in the browser.
Pick this game from the bargain bin if you manage to find a copy there, or rent it over a weekend. I can't recommend a purchase even to the most die-hard Duke Nukem fan.
4/10
Design problems in modern FPSes
When I was trying to sleep yesterday, I was kept up for quite some time by an immortal mosquito, I just couldn't get rid of that bastard. I also played through Modern Warfare 2 for the first time yesterday, and with that game fresh in mind lying awake it came to me. The major design problem with CoD and all its clones.
The games are acting like they are high-action adrenalin-pumping supershooters with onslaughts of enemies just lining up in your crosshairs, but they play like they want to be tactical shooters. It's a massive contradiction where you have slow gameplay, yet insane action. It just doesn't fit together very well.
Speaking of that, when did tactical shooters start to mean slow gameplay and taking cover? Because I sure as hell can confirm that neither Call of Duty nor any of the other similar FPSes have got anything remotely tactical in their single-player gameplay. And when did the gameplay in FPSes decline so much that you actually have to send a practically never-ending army against the player, making his trigger finger almost permanently used to not bore him?
Rainbow Six, one of the more famous tactical shooters didn't feature cover based bullshit, nor a truckfull of enemies to gun down like a rail-shooter. What it featured was an actual need to use tactics to tackle each mission, instead of just run in guns blazing. It didn't feature regenerating health either, so it actually had some pacing. Not just TURBO all the way through. I wish developers would think of that when trying to mix stuff all the time.
Anyways, I'm off to pick up Duke Nukem Forever now. I've got absolutely no expectations, but we'll see what the game manages to deliver.
The games are acting like they are high-action adrenalin-pumping supershooters with onslaughts of enemies just lining up in your crosshairs, but they play like they want to be tactical shooters. It's a massive contradiction where you have slow gameplay, yet insane action. It just doesn't fit together very well.
Speaking of that, when did tactical shooters start to mean slow gameplay and taking cover? Because I sure as hell can confirm that neither Call of Duty nor any of the other similar FPSes have got anything remotely tactical in their single-player gameplay. And when did the gameplay in FPSes decline so much that you actually have to send a practically never-ending army against the player, making his trigger finger almost permanently used to not bore him?
Rainbow Six, one of the more famous tactical shooters didn't feature cover based bullshit, nor a truckfull of enemies to gun down like a rail-shooter. What it featured was an actual need to use tactics to tackle each mission, instead of just run in guns blazing. It didn't feature regenerating health either, so it actually had some pacing. Not just TURBO all the way through. I wish developers would think of that when trying to mix stuff all the time.
Anyways, I'm off to pick up Duke Nukem Forever now. I've got absolutely no expectations, but we'll see what the game manages to deliver.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
The problem with modern shooters
Regenerating health in shooter games go hand-in-hand with with taking cover. Having to take multiple pauses in every long fight due to getting hit a few times (you can't take many before dying) makes you want to take cover. Now, there isn't anything inherently wrong with abusing terrain to avoid taking damage from enemies. People do it all the time in all shooters.
Doing it to regenerate your health in the middle of a fight for a number of seconds just slows down the pace of the game, wastes your time and promotes passive play. I don't want you to think that I'm arguing that all games with regenerating health are bad though. I'm not. I am, however, arguing that in nearly every game that features regenerating health, the system dumbs down the game, and hinders the gameplay.
It's not all bad though. Pausing for several seconds every now and then lengthens the game time, but then again, do we really want a game that takes more time to complete due to having dead time, or would we rather be playing a shorter game with no such wasted moments? And with recent trends, is that even the case? I need you to know that I don't have an agenda against the Call of Duty games, but they are one of the largest FPS-series right now, and because of that I will be using them in multiple examples throughout this article.
The latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops features the regenerating health, just like almost every other modern FPS game. Despite it having loads of dull moments and time wasted by just sitting down, most can easily complete the entire single-player campaign on the first run in just four to six hours. I don't think this is solely due to the dumbed-down nature of the regenerating health-FPS, rather than a general decline in the FPS-industry, but it is a note I wanted to bring up.
The passive play that I've mentioned also comes naturally with the infinitely regenerating health-low max HP. If you know that there are enemies around, you won't move far away from cover unless you want to die. It just won't happen in a normal run through of the average shooter featuring regenerating health. Unless there is only one or two enemies left a live, rule of thumb says you will get shot down.
There we have boring, time-wasting and passive gameplay in the soup. Another thing the regenerating health adds is a complete lack of skill-requirement. I'd like to add that all games consisting of PvE (the single-player component) generally can't be compared to PvP (the multiplayer components) skill wise, as the AI can only be so complex, and the game generally favors that you should win, else people wouldn't play it. I won't go into that now however, it isn't the point of this article.
I believe that with sufficient patience, a player with no experience at all will be able to beat a game like Call of Duty without much problem, as long as they get a few pointers from the start. To test this out, I actually managed to convince a friend with practically no gaming experience to try beat the Call of Duty: Black Ops single-player. This was the very first shooter this player had ever touched, and besides short encounters with old platformers, the first game as well.
After having my "test subject" getting used to how to actually control the game (PC version), I explained the basics of the gameplay and showed a few minutes of gameplay of the first level in the game. I made sure to let my test subject really understand the importance of taking cover as soon as the screen flashed moderately red, and to also move forward really carefully, and to never stray too far away from cover unless necessary.
This test wasn't completed in one setting, and it took quite a bit longer than my first five and a half hour playthrough of Black Ops, but despite me having so many years of FPS-experience, my test subject completed the game with fewer deaths than my first run, just because I played much less carefully and didn't care about cover as much. Although this isn't a scientific study by any means, it proves that the skill requirement really is taken away in these kind of shooters. I highly doubt anyone with no experience would be able to beat Doom, Quake or even Halo (no real emphasis on cover), despite its regenerating shield, just like that.
Like with most things, there are positives here too. The general easiness of these games is one of the reasons I believe the FPS and 3PS genres have boomed so much in these last years. The appearance of casual FPSes in abundance has really helped the market grow, and never before have we seen FPS games being sold in such high numbers, getting so much attention. Anyone with an urge for action can pick up Call of Duty and have a go with it without any trouble. You don't need to be a hardcore gamer to play these games nowadays. It's great for the entire gaming industry, but it might be a bit detrimental to the genre itself, with mass production of cloned games being released all the time.
I have brought up many negatives with the regenerating health-shooter, and the specifically cover-based shooter is just like everything I have written above, but even worse and more extreme (in general as always). The core flaw with these games is that the gameplay is just not fun. I don't care what you say, but the way you play these games really are no fun. Hear me out before you dismiss this.
Passive gameplay is no fun. You don't want to just sit around when you play games. This is one of the reasons you never have long passages of just walking from A to B in games. At least not in well-received games. The same goes for short passages of waiting around, when there are so much more of them, taking place every other minute or so.
Camping isn't fun. People hate campers in multiplayer games, and being the one camping is seldom as fun as running around and killing people all over the place could be. These games have camping as pretty much a core mechanic in their single-player, although not as extreme as it can be in multiplayer environments.
The gameplay isn't as rewarding. In shooters where you have finite health and the only way to regenerate it is with pickups, ever bullet you take feels much more, compared to games where you just have a timeout from the action for a few second and you're ready to go again. I'm not saying that you start crying for every HP you lose, but there is no such thing as the tension of being low on life, not knowing how many enemies you will face and where the next medkit is in today's games.
Every death in Call of Duty can happen in the blink of an eye if you're not careful, but the consequences are hardly felt at all. With an abundance of checkpoints after nearly every skirmish, death is nothing but a minor annoyance that sets you back not more than a few minutes. You will likely die if you don't play carefully, but there is no punishment to dying, so there is no real incentive to play carefully.
When you take damage in a game like Half-Life, you regret it, you wish you didn't take that damage. It might cripple you in the future, you can be unsure if you can survive the coming encounter with your remaining health, and you have no idea when you will get the chance to refill it. When you die, you die. Without autosaves around every corner, you will at least have to make the effort to quicksave if you think you might face something extraordinary dangerous.
You might be thinking "What the hell, if all these games suck so much, why do they sell so much? Your point is obviously invalid!" - No. I am not trying to say that these games are all bad. What I'm saying that their core gameplay (although not as core as shooting enemies with guns) is bad by default. That doesn't keep me from enjoying games like Black Ops, and Killzone 2, as a couple of examples. What makes these games fun to play though, has nothing to do with their core gameplay.
What makes these games fun to play is that the basic objective of them, that is shooting people, feels good. With the default bad gameplay these games contain, to make a game really good, the other parts have to be extraordinarily good. Killzone 2 would be nothing if the graphics weren't stunning and the feel of the combat was bland. Black Ops would blow if the environments weren't interesting and nice to look at, the act of shooting enemies felt awesome.
A game with bland set pieces and bad core gameplay makes a really boring or bad game. A game with really good set pieces and bad core gameplay makes a good game. Sometimes the set pieces are extremely, extraordinarily good, and manage to compensate enough for the bad core gameplay to be really quite great. The other parts of a game can in some cases be so good we forget about how boring and unchallenging the gameplay really is.
Killzone 2 is such a game that comes mind that wasn't released all that long ago. With universal acclaim from critics, the game made us forget about the boring core gameplay by looking so damn good, having among the greatest designed enemies in a game ever, ridiculously polished mechanics, guns that felt completely perfect, and an unbelievable response from enemies when we shot them. Few games can really come close to Killzone 2 when it comes to how actually shooting an enemy feels. Despite the fact that you most of the time sat behind a piece of conveniently placed chest-high cover.
I believe I have written more than enough examples, and that you by now should get my point and are able to find what sets the good modern shooters apart from the bad ones. The bad core gameplay is not impossible to overcome, but the amount of good you have to achieve in all other parts of the game to pass a certain standard is quite ridiculous. And the modern gamer has been spoon-fed with these games for so long now that playing a shooter without heavy emphasis on cover almost feels strange. We have become allergic for shooters without the "tactical" tag in them. And this I find sad.
I like overusing the phrase "bad core gameplay".
I feel that I should also point out that there isn't anything inherently wrong with tactical shooters -- I have had lots of enjoyment with games like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, what I do wonder though, is since the older games worked perfectly fine without regenerating health - why do the newer ones need it?
Edit: I'm not sure anyone will notice, but I accidentally wrote that my first run of CoD:BO only took four and a half hours - I was thinking of Halo 3. CoD:BO was five and a half hours.
Doing it to regenerate your health in the middle of a fight for a number of seconds just slows down the pace of the game, wastes your time and promotes passive play. I don't want you to think that I'm arguing that all games with regenerating health are bad though. I'm not. I am, however, arguing that in nearly every game that features regenerating health, the system dumbs down the game, and hinders the gameplay.
It's not all bad though. Pausing for several seconds every now and then lengthens the game time, but then again, do we really want a game that takes more time to complete due to having dead time, or would we rather be playing a shorter game with no such wasted moments? And with recent trends, is that even the case? I need you to know that I don't have an agenda against the Call of Duty games, but they are one of the largest FPS-series right now, and because of that I will be using them in multiple examples throughout this article.
The latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops features the regenerating health, just like almost every other modern FPS game. Despite it having loads of dull moments and time wasted by just sitting down, most can easily complete the entire single-player campaign on the first run in just four to six hours. I don't think this is solely due to the dumbed-down nature of the regenerating health-FPS, rather than a general decline in the FPS-industry, but it is a note I wanted to bring up.
The passive play that I've mentioned also comes naturally with the infinitely regenerating health-low max HP. If you know that there are enemies around, you won't move far away from cover unless you want to die. It just won't happen in a normal run through of the average shooter featuring regenerating health. Unless there is only one or two enemies left a live, rule of thumb says you will get shot down.
There we have boring, time-wasting and passive gameplay in the soup. Another thing the regenerating health adds is a complete lack of skill-requirement. I'd like to add that all games consisting of PvE (the single-player component) generally can't be compared to PvP (the multiplayer components) skill wise, as the AI can only be so complex, and the game generally favors that you should win, else people wouldn't play it. I won't go into that now however, it isn't the point of this article.
I believe that with sufficient patience, a player with no experience at all will be able to beat a game like Call of Duty without much problem, as long as they get a few pointers from the start. To test this out, I actually managed to convince a friend with practically no gaming experience to try beat the Call of Duty: Black Ops single-player. This was the very first shooter this player had ever touched, and besides short encounters with old platformers, the first game as well.
After having my "test subject" getting used to how to actually control the game (PC version), I explained the basics of the gameplay and showed a few minutes of gameplay of the first level in the game. I made sure to let my test subject really understand the importance of taking cover as soon as the screen flashed moderately red, and to also move forward really carefully, and to never stray too far away from cover unless necessary.
This test wasn't completed in one setting, and it took quite a bit longer than my first five and a half hour playthrough of Black Ops, but despite me having so many years of FPS-experience, my test subject completed the game with fewer deaths than my first run, just because I played much less carefully and didn't care about cover as much. Although this isn't a scientific study by any means, it proves that the skill requirement really is taken away in these kind of shooters. I highly doubt anyone with no experience would be able to beat Doom, Quake or even Halo (no real emphasis on cover), despite its regenerating shield, just like that.
Like with most things, there are positives here too. The general easiness of these games is one of the reasons I believe the FPS and 3PS genres have boomed so much in these last years. The appearance of casual FPSes in abundance has really helped the market grow, and never before have we seen FPS games being sold in such high numbers, getting so much attention. Anyone with an urge for action can pick up Call of Duty and have a go with it without any trouble. You don't need to be a hardcore gamer to play these games nowadays. It's great for the entire gaming industry, but it might be a bit detrimental to the genre itself, with mass production of cloned games being released all the time.
I have brought up many negatives with the regenerating health-shooter, and the specifically cover-based shooter is just like everything I have written above, but even worse and more extreme (in general as always). The core flaw with these games is that the gameplay is just not fun. I don't care what you say, but the way you play these games really are no fun. Hear me out before you dismiss this.
Passive gameplay is no fun. You don't want to just sit around when you play games. This is one of the reasons you never have long passages of just walking from A to B in games. At least not in well-received games. The same goes for short passages of waiting around, when there are so much more of them, taking place every other minute or so.
Camping isn't fun. People hate campers in multiplayer games, and being the one camping is seldom as fun as running around and killing people all over the place could be. These games have camping as pretty much a core mechanic in their single-player, although not as extreme as it can be in multiplayer environments.
The gameplay isn't as rewarding. In shooters where you have finite health and the only way to regenerate it is with pickups, ever bullet you take feels much more, compared to games where you just have a timeout from the action for a few second and you're ready to go again. I'm not saying that you start crying for every HP you lose, but there is no such thing as the tension of being low on life, not knowing how many enemies you will face and where the next medkit is in today's games.
Every death in Call of Duty can happen in the blink of an eye if you're not careful, but the consequences are hardly felt at all. With an abundance of checkpoints after nearly every skirmish, death is nothing but a minor annoyance that sets you back not more than a few minutes. You will likely die if you don't play carefully, but there is no punishment to dying, so there is no real incentive to play carefully.
When you take damage in a game like Half-Life, you regret it, you wish you didn't take that damage. It might cripple you in the future, you can be unsure if you can survive the coming encounter with your remaining health, and you have no idea when you will get the chance to refill it. When you die, you die. Without autosaves around every corner, you will at least have to make the effort to quicksave if you think you might face something extraordinary dangerous.
You might be thinking "What the hell, if all these games suck so much, why do they sell so much? Your point is obviously invalid!" - No. I am not trying to say that these games are all bad. What I'm saying that their core gameplay (although not as core as shooting enemies with guns) is bad by default. That doesn't keep me from enjoying games like Black Ops, and Killzone 2, as a couple of examples. What makes these games fun to play though, has nothing to do with their core gameplay.
What makes these games fun to play is that the basic objective of them, that is shooting people, feels good. With the default bad gameplay these games contain, to make a game really good, the other parts have to be extraordinarily good. Killzone 2 would be nothing if the graphics weren't stunning and the feel of the combat was bland. Black Ops would blow if the environments weren't interesting and nice to look at, the act of shooting enemies felt awesome.
A game with bland set pieces and bad core gameplay makes a really boring or bad game. A game with really good set pieces and bad core gameplay makes a good game. Sometimes the set pieces are extremely, extraordinarily good, and manage to compensate enough for the bad core gameplay to be really quite great. The other parts of a game can in some cases be so good we forget about how boring and unchallenging the gameplay really is.
Killzone 2 is such a game that comes mind that wasn't released all that long ago. With universal acclaim from critics, the game made us forget about the boring core gameplay by looking so damn good, having among the greatest designed enemies in a game ever, ridiculously polished mechanics, guns that felt completely perfect, and an unbelievable response from enemies when we shot them. Few games can really come close to Killzone 2 when it comes to how actually shooting an enemy feels. Despite the fact that you most of the time sat behind a piece of conveniently placed chest-high cover.
I believe I have written more than enough examples, and that you by now should get my point and are able to find what sets the good modern shooters apart from the bad ones. The bad core gameplay is not impossible to overcome, but the amount of good you have to achieve in all other parts of the game to pass a certain standard is quite ridiculous. And the modern gamer has been spoon-fed with these games for so long now that playing a shooter without heavy emphasis on cover almost feels strange. We have become allergic for shooters without the "tactical" tag in them. And this I find sad.
I like overusing the phrase "bad core gameplay".
I feel that I should also point out that there isn't anything inherently wrong with tactical shooters -- I have had lots of enjoyment with games like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, what I do wonder though, is since the older games worked perfectly fine without regenerating health - why do the newer ones need it?
Edit: I'm not sure anyone will notice, but I accidentally wrote that my first run of CoD:BO only took four and a half hours - I was thinking of Halo 3. CoD:BO was five and a half hours.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Design Decisions in Duke Nukem Forever
I must say, I never really got into Duke Nukem 3D, and I haven't even touched the earlier games in the series. Yet, I understand the old-school shooters. Doom is one of my all-time favourite games, and I've spent countless hours playing it. I love the Quake series and appreciate many other similar games.
I never owned DN3D when it was new, though I have played bits of it, and watched many videos of gameplay, so I am familiar with the game and its style. I also recently bought it on Good Old Games to warm up for Duke Nukem Forever, and whilst I haven't played it enough to rate it or anything like that, I have been enjoying it thus far.
I believe DNF will have the charm and wits of its predecessor, and I will most likely enjoy that part of the game. The weapons I've seen thus far seem quite cool and the self-mocking humor is quite hilarious. There are, however, a couple of design decisions in the game that I really can't wrap my head around at all.
Regenerating health was popularized in modern games by Halo (although the first game just had regenerating shields), and has since then been the system used in almost all first and third person shooters. It works better or worse in different cases, but in most games it promotes cowardly (read: boring) play, by staying near cover so you can duck down if you're in danger and never die. It practically removes any rush you might get from being low on HP and not having a medkit at hand, and also removes most difficulty, allowing you to be immortal as long as you aren't on an open field and you have the duck-key nearby.
I admit, it's not always bad. In some games where you want a more cinematic experience, health packs might break the immersion and flow of gameplay, but these games are - strictly gameplay speaking - more boring and less rewarding due to the decreased skill requirement. Take Call of Duty for example. Black Ops, the latest installment in the series, can be pretty brutal on the hardest difficulty, but that's only because you die from approximately half a bullet hitting you. The game doesn't necessarily require more skill than on easier difficulties though - it simply requires more cowardly gameplay by sticking your head under cover more, until it's finally safe to move to the next piece of cover.
Take a game like Quake instead, for example. In that game you also die pretty damn easily on the hardest difficulty in that game unless you're careful, as the enemies can take quite big chunks of your health if they start landing attacks on you. Unlike Black Ops and most FPSes with regenerating health, however, you don't stay alive by ducking under some sort of cover. You survive by controlling your character properly and by knowing what to expect from each enemy you encounter. You dodge attacks by sidestepping and using speed, and if something bad happens, it's so much more rewarding to get away with a slim amount of health left, rather than ducking behind cover for a few seconds to continue taking pot shots. The active gameplay of many shooters without regenerating health is simply more fun than that of most shooters with regenerating health.
To all who have played Duke Nukem 3D, it's obvious that the game falls in the category of the more fun and rewarding fast paced shooters, which is why I was greatly surprised when I found out that Duke Nukem Forever would have a regenerating health system. Or Ego, as it's called in DNF. I must say that the Ego system made me smile, a clear example of the awesome style of the Duke Nukem games. And I don't think it would have made much sense picking up Ego-packs or Ego-kits to replenish your 100 ego.
That doesn't change that the regenerating health system seems to do more harm than good, though. While it's not as extreme as Call of Duty, according to gameplay videos of the demo that I've seen, Duke Nukem Forever's gameplay feels slower and more boring than Duke Nukem 3D. Running behind large rocks to wait for Duke's ego to fill up again doesn't really feel that fun.
This is one of the two main concerns with the design decisions in Duke Nukem Forever, which seems to be helplessly lost between the good old days and the new age of casual FPSes. It was said that DNF would cater to the old school fans, while still appealing to fans of modern shooters. For some reason, the message they seem to be delivering is that the only way fans of modern shooters will play a game is if it contains generic health regeneration and a maximum capacity of two weapons. Just to let them know: We don't just want to play Duke Nukem for the humor and awesome weapons - the actual gameplay is also important.
This brings me to my second issue, which is the two-weapon limit that I mentioned earlier. I generally don't find this as detrimental to gameplay as regenerating health. Having a limited amount of weapons you are able to carry works great in many games, especially those who have a more strategic gameplay than just running and gunning. Games aiming for at least some realism feel natural to have a limited carrying capacity.
I'll use Call of Duty: Black Ops as an example this time as well. The game contains many weapons, but most are quite similar, just having different specs (e.g. damage, accuracy, rate of fire and so on). This is not a bad thing by necessity, as the game is aiming for a more realistic experience, and carrying around on 10 assault rifles, 7 SMGs, 3 shotguns, a rocket launcher and 4 pistols at the same time would feel pretty damn stupid and out of place in Black Ops.
Duke Nukem and most old shooters don't have this problem though. Quake for example has a shotgun, an upgraded version, a nailgun (works like a machine gun) and an upgraded version, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher and the Thunderbolt (besides the basic melee weapon). As you can see, there aren't all that many different weapons, but more importantly, besides the upgraded versions of some weapons, none are really all that similar. Most of these old-school shooters contain similar weapons, plus one or more "special" weapons - in Quake's case it would be the Thunderbolt, and Duke Nukem 3D has among others the shrink ray.
Just like Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem Forever has lots of awesome and unique weapons, and thanks to that doesn't need a limited carrying capacity. I think we also can agree that DNF isn't trying to be a realistic shooter, nor a particularly strategic one. But why does it then need to limit the max amount of weapons carried to just two?
I have no answer to that question. I can't think of a logical explanation as to why you aren't allowed to carry more weapons. One could say that managing and toggling between so many weapons is difficult, but that just isn't true. It worked for a decade, so why wouldn't it work now. I thought we were all about evolution, not devolution.
To make matters worse, many of the "special" weapons that have been confirmed to be usable in DNF are quite niche. If you pick up the shrink or freeze ray you will be limited to just one weapon capable of actual offense. Since many other weapons aren't really worth wasting on particular enemies, or at least not as effective as they can ideally be in the situation you might find yourself in, the limitations of just two weapons is even more crippling.
You probably won't be finding yourself with both the shrink ray and rail gun (sniper), as you don't have anything for actual close combat (besides stepping on shrunken enemies and your boots, but that isn't really adequate). You also probably won't find yourself carrying both a rocket launcher and the freeze ray, as rocket launcher ammunition tends to be too sparse to just freely use on small-fry enemies.
This detracts in much of the game's fun that you can get by experimenting with different weapons, and it also slows down the speed of the game (especially together with regenerating Ego) when you have to stop and think about what weapon to pick up and what to leave behind. Needless to say, it also nullifies some of the niche weapons quite a bit, because would you really want to risk having the shrink ray instead of a weapon that could actually be useful besides for having fun?
It won't surprise me the least if most players also happen to die unnecessarily from happening to have the wrong weapon combination at the wrong time at least once - something that detracts from fun and is just a stupid annoyance. I sure wish I knew why the developers decided on these design elements, and one can only hope they release a commentator track where they explain their thought like some recent games have started doing. I would kill to have an answer.
With this mile long post coming to an end, I still am looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever. I will probably be quite disappointed, so I definitely won't be expecting GOTY-material here, but the things with Duke Nukem they haven't changed yet, like the humor, attitude and campy one-liners.
When the game is released and I have actually played through it, I will be writing a review, sharing my thoughts. I can't say when it will be up, though.
Edit: I hope they're just trolling us though.
I never owned DN3D when it was new, though I have played bits of it, and watched many videos of gameplay, so I am familiar with the game and its style. I also recently bought it on Good Old Games to warm up for Duke Nukem Forever, and whilst I haven't played it enough to rate it or anything like that, I have been enjoying it thus far.
I believe DNF will have the charm and wits of its predecessor, and I will most likely enjoy that part of the game. The weapons I've seen thus far seem quite cool and the self-mocking humor is quite hilarious. There are, however, a couple of design decisions in the game that I really can't wrap my head around at all.
Regenerating health was popularized in modern games by Halo (although the first game just had regenerating shields), and has since then been the system used in almost all first and third person shooters. It works better or worse in different cases, but in most games it promotes cowardly (read: boring) play, by staying near cover so you can duck down if you're in danger and never die. It practically removes any rush you might get from being low on HP and not having a medkit at hand, and also removes most difficulty, allowing you to be immortal as long as you aren't on an open field and you have the duck-key nearby.
I admit, it's not always bad. In some games where you want a more cinematic experience, health packs might break the immersion and flow of gameplay, but these games are - strictly gameplay speaking - more boring and less rewarding due to the decreased skill requirement. Take Call of Duty for example. Black Ops, the latest installment in the series, can be pretty brutal on the hardest difficulty, but that's only because you die from approximately half a bullet hitting you. The game doesn't necessarily require more skill than on easier difficulties though - it simply requires more cowardly gameplay by sticking your head under cover more, until it's finally safe to move to the next piece of cover.
Take a game like Quake instead, for example. In that game you also die pretty damn easily on the hardest difficulty in that game unless you're careful, as the enemies can take quite big chunks of your health if they start landing attacks on you. Unlike Black Ops and most FPSes with regenerating health, however, you don't stay alive by ducking under some sort of cover. You survive by controlling your character properly and by knowing what to expect from each enemy you encounter. You dodge attacks by sidestepping and using speed, and if something bad happens, it's so much more rewarding to get away with a slim amount of health left, rather than ducking behind cover for a few seconds to continue taking pot shots. The active gameplay of many shooters without regenerating health is simply more fun than that of most shooters with regenerating health.
To all who have played Duke Nukem 3D, it's obvious that the game falls in the category of the more fun and rewarding fast paced shooters, which is why I was greatly surprised when I found out that Duke Nukem Forever would have a regenerating health system. Or Ego, as it's called in DNF. I must say that the Ego system made me smile, a clear example of the awesome style of the Duke Nukem games. And I don't think it would have made much sense picking up Ego-packs or Ego-kits to replenish your 100 ego.
That doesn't change that the regenerating health system seems to do more harm than good, though. While it's not as extreme as Call of Duty, according to gameplay videos of the demo that I've seen, Duke Nukem Forever's gameplay feels slower and more boring than Duke Nukem 3D. Running behind large rocks to wait for Duke's ego to fill up again doesn't really feel that fun.
This is one of the two main concerns with the design decisions in Duke Nukem Forever, which seems to be helplessly lost between the good old days and the new age of casual FPSes. It was said that DNF would cater to the old school fans, while still appealing to fans of modern shooters. For some reason, the message they seem to be delivering is that the only way fans of modern shooters will play a game is if it contains generic health regeneration and a maximum capacity of two weapons. Just to let them know: We don't just want to play Duke Nukem for the humor and awesome weapons - the actual gameplay is also important.
This brings me to my second issue, which is the two-weapon limit that I mentioned earlier. I generally don't find this as detrimental to gameplay as regenerating health. Having a limited amount of weapons you are able to carry works great in many games, especially those who have a more strategic gameplay than just running and gunning. Games aiming for at least some realism feel natural to have a limited carrying capacity.
I'll use Call of Duty: Black Ops as an example this time as well. The game contains many weapons, but most are quite similar, just having different specs (e.g. damage, accuracy, rate of fire and so on). This is not a bad thing by necessity, as the game is aiming for a more realistic experience, and carrying around on 10 assault rifles, 7 SMGs, 3 shotguns, a rocket launcher and 4 pistols at the same time would feel pretty damn stupid and out of place in Black Ops.
Duke Nukem and most old shooters don't have this problem though. Quake for example has a shotgun, an upgraded version, a nailgun (works like a machine gun) and an upgraded version, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher and the Thunderbolt (besides the basic melee weapon). As you can see, there aren't all that many different weapons, but more importantly, besides the upgraded versions of some weapons, none are really all that similar. Most of these old-school shooters contain similar weapons, plus one or more "special" weapons - in Quake's case it would be the Thunderbolt, and Duke Nukem 3D has among others the shrink ray.
Just like Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem Forever has lots of awesome and unique weapons, and thanks to that doesn't need a limited carrying capacity. I think we also can agree that DNF isn't trying to be a realistic shooter, nor a particularly strategic one. But why does it then need to limit the max amount of weapons carried to just two?
I have no answer to that question. I can't think of a logical explanation as to why you aren't allowed to carry more weapons. One could say that managing and toggling between so many weapons is difficult, but that just isn't true. It worked for a decade, so why wouldn't it work now. I thought we were all about evolution, not devolution.
To make matters worse, many of the "special" weapons that have been confirmed to be usable in DNF are quite niche. If you pick up the shrink or freeze ray you will be limited to just one weapon capable of actual offense. Since many other weapons aren't really worth wasting on particular enemies, or at least not as effective as they can ideally be in the situation you might find yourself in, the limitations of just two weapons is even more crippling.
You probably won't be finding yourself with both the shrink ray and rail gun (sniper), as you don't have anything for actual close combat (besides stepping on shrunken enemies and your boots, but that isn't really adequate). You also probably won't find yourself carrying both a rocket launcher and the freeze ray, as rocket launcher ammunition tends to be too sparse to just freely use on small-fry enemies.
This detracts in much of the game's fun that you can get by experimenting with different weapons, and it also slows down the speed of the game (especially together with regenerating Ego) when you have to stop and think about what weapon to pick up and what to leave behind. Needless to say, it also nullifies some of the niche weapons quite a bit, because would you really want to risk having the shrink ray instead of a weapon that could actually be useful besides for having fun?
It won't surprise me the least if most players also happen to die unnecessarily from happening to have the wrong weapon combination at the wrong time at least once - something that detracts from fun and is just a stupid annoyance. I sure wish I knew why the developers decided on these design elements, and one can only hope they release a commentator track where they explain their thought like some recent games have started doing. I would kill to have an answer.
With this mile long post coming to an end, I still am looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever. I will probably be quite disappointed, so I definitely won't be expecting GOTY-material here, but the things with Duke Nukem they haven't changed yet, like the humor, attitude and campy one-liners.
When the game is released and I have actually played through it, I will be writing a review, sharing my thoughts. I can't say when it will be up, though.
Edit: I hope they're just trolling us though.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)