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!
No comments:
Post a Comment