Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Demon's Souls Isn't THAT Hard

Now I first want to say that Demon's Souls may be my favorite game on the PS3, giving little big planet a run for it's money (you can expect a post on LBP some time soon). It's a fantastic game with a great sense of reward and it is, as you've heard, difficult.

But posts such as this kind of get to me:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/acz2t/let_me_tell_you_about_demons_souls/

For example, it skips a lot of details. Yes when you're in soul form your health is halved, but your damage output increases and you can wear a ring to get your health at 75%. Yes, others can invade you while in body form, but you can only invade players at higher level than you. Meaning the person who is invaded has a health advantage and a level advantage.

I don't want to mislead people and claim that Demon's Souls is easy because it's not. However, Demon's Souls can be made to be easier. Once you learn the right places to grind and get an equipment setup you enjoy, a lot of the difficulty of the game dissolves. If you are over leveled it's very easy to tell you are as enemies will just be dropping incredibly easy. I grinded so much I beat a few bosses on the first try, one without even taking a single hit point of damage.

This is the why Demon's Souls isn't legendary hard; it's punishing but there is generally an out, a lifeline. Yes if you die you lose your souls, but if you can make it to your bloodstain then cast evacuate you're home free. Let's compare this to, say, Silver Surfer on the NES. I actually own this game, as apparently my parents hated me while growing up. In fact, a look at my NES library seems like I've compiled a list of Angry Video Game Nerd games and got them all.

Anyways, in Silver Surfer you pick whatever level you want to start with (kind of like Demon's Souls) and then get your ass handed to you. The "easiest" way to beat Silver Surfer is to never, ever fuck up. Start on the alligator level (probably the easiest), get full power, and then never lose it. The game was programmed as if you're always at full power, some enemies I feel would be physically impossible to shoot enough to kill before they hit you if you did not have full power.

Now, do you want to know how easy it is to die in Silver Surfer? If ANYTHING touches you, and I fucking mean anything, you die. That's it, try the level again. ANYTHING could be an enemy, or a bullet, or even a wall. Usually it's a pot or some leaf that looks like it's in the background but it turns out nope, you just can't touch that either. This game doesn't fuck around and there's no way out except brutal memorization and patience.

Another thing, those of you who played roguelikes will find Demon's Souls to be pretty forgiving. Demon's Souls has roguelike elements, but is much easier than even modern roguelikes such as Shiren the Wanderer. However, I think this works well in Demon's Souls favour. It really struck a good balance between accomplishment and giving up.

For instance, I've felt the disheartening feeling of essentially having 5 hours of progress absolutely lost in roguelikes. A modern equivalent would be like having your hardcore character in diablo 2 or torchlight die. That's it, games over. After that it may be a few days before you pick up the game again ;) Demon's souls is perfectly snuggled in between.

There is enough punishment that you learn and learn quickly that you are playing on Demon's Souls terms not your own. However, it is not SO punishing that you want vomit every time you see the game disc. It has what many games (at least I feel) should have; a sense of achievement.

Let me tell you, if you haven't played Demon's Souls you really should. The thrill of fighting the first boss and experiencing what can only be described as complete vulnerability was exhilarating. Something I haven't felt in a long, long time. I recommend this game to any who want to wear the label "gamer".

As someone who basically only had near impossible games to play I find playing hard games is fantastic for your gaming personality. I feel I'm often a "zen" gamer. Things do not bother me because I've played these games. I see people raging online when they die in shooters, or frustration mount when the team is under performing in League of Legends.

I, literally, do not understand this. These things do not bother me in the least; I'm accustomed to failure and I'm accustomed to losing because of these games. Losing is PART of a game being a game. It would not be fun if you did not have to fight for your victory. What enjoyment is there in winning if the win was not fought for? This is one thing I agree with the link at the top about; modern games are too easy.

For this, I really respect Demon's Souls and From Software. They made the game they wanted to make for the players they wanted without caving to corporate pressure of "accessibility" and everything for profit (and hell, the game did pretty well!).

To summarize, while Demon's Souls is not the hardest game ever made and is really not even as hard as everyone claims, it is still a challenge. If you want something a little different, a lot of fun and incredibly rewarding I very much recommend this title. Go in with the mindset "I'm going to die and die a lot... and that's okay!" and I assure you the game will reward the patient.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Rebooting games, modern shooters and Medal of Honour

Firstly, yes Honour is spelled with a damn U in it.

So I just watched the new trailer to the new MoH game which you can lovingly watch here:

http://kotaku.com/5531930/new-medal-of-honor-trailer-aims-for-the-heart

I admire that they're trying to add a more personal element to the game. What I don't admire is that another shooter is getting a reboot.

What in the FUCK is going on in the games industry? Firstly, just calling it "Medal of Honour" pisses me off. The first one is only 11 fucking years old, is this REALLY necessary? Do we really need to name games so they pander to the 12 year old console children who shouldn't even be playing this game in the first place? Starcraft is older than the first Medal of Honour and it's new game is properly called "Starcraft 2". Imagine if Blizzard released "Starcraft 2" and just called it "Starcraft", this is the exact damn thing they're doing.

Why I hate this is because it's so POINTLESS to do. It makes it a pain in the balls to talk about with people because now when I talk about it they go "what one are you talking about, the new one or the old one?" And saying "Medal of Honour 2010" sounds like it's a God damn sports game. And in reality, if the games industry grew some balls you could just call it what it is "Medal of Honour: We Want to Cash In on the Success of Modern Warfare 2" we'd all be in a better place.

Now, a lot of people claim that Battlefield was going all "modern warfare 2" with Bad Company 2. I think this is kind of bullshit as really the ONLY thing similar is that they both have a single player campaign with a terrible story and boring characters. In fact, Battlefield 2 which was modern combat came out in 2005, 3 years before Call of Duty 4. Thus it's more or less just factually incorrect to claim DICE copied MW2, because they fucking did it first. Plus the multiplayer in these two games are night and day different (myself preferring battlefield's).

However, Medal of Honour, as far as I know, has always been a World War 2 game and is so obviously going after the new Modern Warfare craze that seems to be sweeping the industry. As I'm writing I'm trying to hold back my rage to form a coherent article here (unlike my last one, this was written not at around 7:50pm instead of 5am). So lets try to examine the good and the bad.

Good Stuff
  • The first few Medal of Honour games were really good, maybe this one will be as well.
  • We have enough fucking World War 2 FPS games. Really, I could go for about 2 or 3 years without seeing one and that would be just fine with me.
  • It looks like they may make a story that actually makes sense.
Bad Stuff
  • The modern setting shooter seems to be the new WW2 shooter. We fucking have enough of them do something new.
  • The fucking box:
Lets talk about the two bad points. First I'm going to start with the box.

Remember what I said in my last post about modern shooters being written for idiots? Who the fuck is this douche on the box? Are companies so desparate to get into the jager pounding frat boy houses they need to put a backwards baseball cap wearing, bearded fuck head right on the damn box? Are they hoping these morons will just wander in the store and go "Look brah that guy like has a hat and a gun! WHOAAAA I NEED THIS!"

This isn't the only reason I'm pissed at the box. The beard is the other. The fucking beard. Why do I hate beards? I don't, the better question is why does the military hate beards; because they do. The Canadian, British and American military DO NOT ALLOW BEARDS ON THEIR SERVICEMEN. So who the fuck IS this guy? I mean some stubble is alright, in a combat zone you can't be expected to shave every day. However, this guy has clearly been growing his beard for months. If an officer saw him he would be forced to shave or be dishonourably discharged. That's what they could call this game Medal of Dishonourable Dischargement.

Well, enough about the box; lets address the other "bad" point I made. There are too many modern shooters. Now admittedly there are like what? BF2 and it's gazillion expansions, COD4, COD6, Bad Company 1 and Bad Company 2, and medal of honour 2010 when it comes out. This isn't too many considering there are probably more WW2 FPS games in the Medal of Honour series alone. What really irks me though is that there's clearly some money grubbing fucker running the show.

"Oh wow look how well this "modern warfare 2" thingy sold, we need one of them! Make a game like it!" If you all want to learn something about me; I hate business men. They're slimy shitfaced bastards. They care about money and only money, no matter who needs to suffer or what needs to be done just to get their bonus. It doesn't matter if your development team is pushing 90 hour weeks with declining health so long as you get your fucking bonus. Medal of Honour reeks of a "business man" decision.

I know someone will inevitably tell me "Gaming companies are businesses first and need money." How MUCH money exactly? I don't think people really understand the business world. When a company "loses money" it just means their revenue dropped, it doesn't mean they actually had more of an expenditure than they did revenue. So when a bank, for instance, says "we lost 1 billion dollars this year!" it simply means instead of making 40 billion dollars like they did last year they made 39 billion dollars. It's the exact same with the games industry when we hear these ludicrous claims. I can assure you that developers do not give a shitting fuck that their last game only sold 1 million copies and that wasn't enough for upper management.

So now that I've kind of sidetracked and ranted, I further want to claim that making another modern shooter isn't just assured money like I'm sure some suit thinks is. There is a little thing called over-saturation. Look at all the "X Hero" music games. No one gives half a fuck anymore. Activision turned a cash cow into a dead horse so they could beat it some more. When you keep making these games people stop caring. Why does NO ONE in the industry making decisions want to do ANYTHING unique at all?

This is the main gripe I've had for a long time. The indie scene, I must admit, has given me some amazing and original titles and for that I thank them. But we've seen nothing but stagnation for like 10 years now. Everything is just copying everything else. Remember WW2 shooters? Why did barely ANY of them take place on the pacific front? You know there was a war over there too, right gaming companies? You could have given us something familiar but different at the same time. COD5 actually did have pacific missions which were actually interesting to play, so I feel it's a reasonable enough point.

I want someone out there to take a chance and deviate EVEN JUST A TINY BIT from the modern shooter formula. We need people in charge who care about games again. Someone save us!

Monday, May 3, 2010

Why most modern FPS games stupid as hell

Let's get a few things straight. There have been stupid FPS games since the absolute beginning of the genre with Wolfenstein. I mean, robot Hitler with dual chain guns for hands? Awesome! My gripe though isn't just "stupid in concept" because personally I love stupid in concept.

Duke 3D is stupid in concept, but it knows that it's just taking a piss and has a ton of fun with it. Serious Sam was the same. Unreal Tournament is the same - it's all over the top fun. It knows it's all impossible so it just says "fuck reality, lets do FUN THINGS".

This idea of "fuck reality" has stuck with FPS games pretty much forever. Even the modern shooters like call of duty 4/6 and Bad Company 2 have such ludicrously impossible feats you pull off that they shouldn't be taken seriously. That's, of course, what makes them fun! Think of them like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. The characters are serious, but you know that really it's all just for fun and to blow things up. However, unlike even Arnold's movies I just can't shake the feeling that most (not all) modern FPS games are just stupid as hell.

That may have come from left field, but I thought all this out as I just beat Bad Company 2. Firstly, without going into spoiler details; the plots of both bad company 2 and modern warfare 2 are fucking terrible. I mean, these stories have such huge, gaping plot holes it's almost a joke within itself. So many times I just slammed my head onto the desk in disbelief at what could only be described as a link so weak bridging story elements it bordered on ethereal.

Even if we go back to good old Arnold's movies, he may do impossible things and the story may even involve a cartoonish villain, but the story MAKES LOGICAL SENSE. There is, give or take, a meaningful and easy to follow progression from one scene to the next which doesn't cause you to literally question how any of this makes sense at all or fit together. MW2 for me is the most guilty of this.

Moving on though, Bad Company 2 recently pissed me off in that I hated the characters. I'm pretty sure you could not possibly make the characters any more stereotypical unless you gave the Jewish guy a yamaka and the hick a cowboy hat. Though stereotypes in themselves do not inherently mean the characters are bad, but the writing was atrocious. It was at this point that it hit me like a brick wall: "This game was written for idiots."

Yes, I know I'm an egotistical dick, thank you. However, I'm almost positive I'm right. The dialogue clearly caters to the everyman and uses such lame and over used jokes with such a resoundingly clever punchlines "the hick likes cheerleaders, football and beer". Why is this happening? Half-Life and Half-Life 2, games I cannot praise enough, were amazingly complex in the story for example.

For one, it at least made fucking sense. Yes it is sci-fi, and yes it is ridiculous - but as I said above that is not the problem. The story is expertly told, the characters are deep and likable and there are philosophical similar to (or even ripped right off from) something like the book 1984 evokes. There are several references to physics, science and academia; long story short Half-Life is the FPS for an intelligent person.

As such, I want to lay down some things I'd like FPS games to at least attempt to adhere to.

1) I don't want to leave my body or lose control
I noticed this in bad company 2 and it drove me fucking crazy. MW2 may have had a worse story, but at least it TOLD it's terrible story better. BC2 suffers from constantly, CONSTANTLY yanking control from me. There were even parts when it stayed in first person mode, yet didn't even let me LOOK AROUND - it locked the camera directly on what I was supposed to be looking at as if I was a retarded monkey and couldn't be trusted to do what it wanted.

Now, I realize setting "never leaving your body" as a hard and fast rule is impractical. Some cutscenes are fine, but I'd really like them to be at the beginning of a level or during a briefing or something. In BC2 you would just walk up to a hill, the game would fade to black, play like honest to shit a 20 second cutscene of your squad chatting and inevitably making a bad joke while emphasizing their stereotypes, then cutting back. It left me wondering "why the hell did that happen?" Was it too much to trust me not to run down the path like a blood drunk lunatic ignoring all the dialogue to do it in game? Is your target audience really so frothy at the mouth for violence that they can't even stop at an OBVIOUSLY cinematic point and listen to the squad?

I mean really, that's what this is about; trust. Half-Life TRUSTS me. It says "hey, don't worry, I trust you to notice when a vehicle is flying in. No need to take control from you!" Bad Company 2 though gives me the impression of "NO YOU'RE FAR TOO STUPID TO POSSIBLY DO THIS RIGHT! HERE LET ME DO IT!" What an asshole that guy is!

2) Your story has to at least be logically consistant
I'm not crazy enough to expect a Nietzschean level of poetic prose while critiquing the structures of religion and its entanglement in western morals in a game where you just want to blow shit up. However, at the very least your story needs to be logically valid. There shouldn't be any elephant sized plot holes and characters need at least KIND OF believable reasons for doing whatever they are doing.

I think perhaps part of the problem FPS games are running into is they're trying to be too complex except the medium of an FPS game simply does not allow for the required depth and explanation of what is actually happening. Thus we get these narrative gaps, which lead to plot gaps, which lead to me getting really pissed off at how shitty your story is told. Which of course goes hand in hand with:

3) Your story needs to be told well
Again, in an FPS game you don't have all the possibilities of a finely crafted book. Rely on the characters, the environment and queues to the player. Movies aren't like books either, and they can tell a damn fine story. If you want your story to be important, you need to tell it well - this is crucial. Or you could always go the route of serious sam which is just "bad guy, kill him" which sometimes, works just fine.

4) Make your story interesting
This is probably the fluffiest point here. What I want to stress is that a story does not need to be amazing and groundbreaking to be interesting. Again, I enjoy Arnold's movies and they're fairly derivative. I feel as things stand now, studios have making the gameplay interesting down fine, but the story itself is just kind of latched on.

Well it's 5:15am, i'd better sleep!