The Order: 1886 - Ready at Dawn's Triumph, Sony's Failure

The Order: 1886 was supposed by be the first TRUE next gen experience.  Instead, we got a 2 hour movie that forced us to walk down hall ways shorting at people for 3 hours in order to see the next scene.  But are we being fair to the game in our criticism?  Dose the interactive experience not have a place in gaming?  This week The Head Pirate takes a closer look.

How we got here

Historically, entertainment and expressive media relied so heavily on tradition that both stagnation and solidification had a chance to set in before variation took place.  By the time we got board of writing the same old stories and decided it might be neat to do the whole thing in meter and rhyme it was already crystal clear what made a story a story or a novel a novel, so it was instantly apparent was made a poem a poem.  By the time plays moved to moving pictures, we already knew that a comedy was a completely different thing from a drama.  Rarely in history do we find misrepresentation of this; there are no “short books that just happen to rhyme” or people who write them; there are authors and poets, stories and poems.  Society always has the time, and the artists the motivation, to explain all of the new ways media would be used long before the next set of experimentation came alone.  The drumbeat of human progress generally skips over art; with few exceptions.  Stone tablets from 4000BCE are not drastically different from the books of today, and a painting from last year might utilize the same style, pigments (paints) and canvas as some of the oldest painting ever made. Even the games we play haven’t changed much; Today's Hand Egg and Stick Ball (I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re called.  Not a sports guy) wouldn't look that different to fans of the sports played by the Romans or Aztec thousands of year ago.

Video game, however, break this mold.  With only 80 years of pedigree, there is no clear cultural understanding of variation within Video games.  Where someone who has never seen a movie will still be able to identify a comedy and differentiate it from a western, try asking your Grandmother to pick which one of two video games is a isometric top down and which is a two-stick shooter.  Even more dramatic, a child who has played video games on mobile, console, and PC might look at a Pong box or even game from the Atari 2600 and not immediately recognize them as video games at all.* As such we tend to talk about the “gamer” when there really is no such thing.  You’re unlikely to find someone who equally enjoys JPGS, MOBA’s Fighters, CCGs, and Pokémon.  Instead people tend to stick to a few closely connected genes, branching out only a few times a year when the hype associated with an individual game makes it seem worth it.  This reason is important; the JRPG fans doesn't spontaneously decide to try a Brawler, he decide to try a great looking hyped game that happens to a brawler.  The same is true of traditional media.  The action movie fan doesn't wake up one day, decide he’s got it all wrong, and go looking for romantic comedies to watch, although he might see any given romantic comedy if the trailer caught his interest.  Obviously, this makes it very important that the trailer doesn't misrepresent the film.  The Dark Knight is the 2nd highest rated film on IMDb, yet would still disappoint someone who went to see it thinking it was a buddy cop movie because the trailer focused on a few choice interactions with the commissioner.

Haters gonna hate.  And sometimes not hate.

Telltale’s "The Walking Dead" (TWD) is basically The Order: 1886 with toned down visuals and less things to pick up and look at.  Given these were sited as the high points of The Order, it seems pretty logical that TWD, a similar game that lacks The Order's strong points, should have a meta-critic rating in the low 50s and received universal panning by the gaming media.  So how did it end up winning a slew of Game of the Year awards, spawn a sequel and 3 almost identical series, and score over 90? It seems obvious that this type of game, the interactive story, is enjoyed by a large number of people and respected by the gaming media for the experience that it provides.  In fact, it could easily be argued that the Telltale games offer LESS in the way of game play, as they never break away from quick time events and story decisions into, for example, a shooting or exploration sequence.  Other games like Gone Home, Dear Esther and the Stanley Parable also received almost universe praise as games despite having no game-play elements at all.  How is a story where the only interaction is hitting "up"om your keyboard end up being accepted as a better game then The Order, which at least tries to be an actual game?  It turns out we learned that lesson a long time ago when we requested the earliest attempts at the interactive movie.

Back in the 90s, CD technology gave way to the popular trend of putting every-freaking-thing under the sun on the CD even if it has no reason to be there.  Map, books, encyclopedia … someone, somewhere thought they belonged on a CD.  By the time DVDs came around, the buying up disks of just about anything trend was in full swing, and many tried to capitalize on the next big thing.  Most agreed this would be the interactive movie.  By using the remote, the viewer could make choices which would send the DVD to a given bookmark and somehow change the experience.  The first were nothing more than glorified “chose you own adventure” books, where some choices continued a fixed story, and some lead to the story ending in some form of horrible death for the main character.  They were marketed as family experiences; parents will think the are watching a movie, but the kids will think they are playing a video game.  Despite dozens of companies trying dozens of approaches they saw little success because they disappointed both parties involved.  To the parents, or movie lovers, it was just a bad movie, and to the kids, it was just a bad video game.  It couldn't deliver on both promises at once, and in trying to do so it ended up delivering nether. So the parents went back to watching real movies and the kids went back to playing real video games and everything was right in the universe.  That is until for some yet unknown reason someone thought it would be a good idea to give this interactive movie another go.  We were promised pretty much the same thing as before; innovative use of technology, a movie that changes based on the choices you made, and a custom experience that added a higher level of immersion.  What we got was Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and now The Order all fail where Telltale games success because of misrepresentation and over ambition, and The Order fails the most because it was the most ambitious.  Like the long haired (we assume) game designers of the 90s, they seek to unify the movie watching and video game playing experience into something that appeals to both sides, while Telltale is simply trying to tell a story on the computer.  The activity, where it exists, is more like page turning then video game playing, and they do nothing to hide that.  They only true interactivity comes in choosing how a character will deliver a line, or if person A will die, leaving person B to deliver their lines for the rest of the story.  And it’s perfect!  It’s what movie lovers have always wanted; to be the main character.  To choose how they react and what to say.  To decide if the Hero is a brooding anti-hero or a happy-go-lucky trickster.  We've spent 50 years screaming “no, don’t kill him, kill her!” at the screen because we liked one character more than the other, and now we get to make the call.   They are not games.  They are not for gamers.  They are stories, for people who love stories, and they are marketed as such.  The Order, in it's focus on additional game play elements over branching story and control over the main character, offers now of these things to fans of stories, and to fans of video games it's simply not a very good one.  Worse, Sony told gamers that they would love it, and showed trailer after trailer of game-play, trying to fool us into believing we would get a different experience then the one we got.

The Final Word

There is nothing wrong with an interactive story.  It’s not a lesser experience to playing a game, and if the non-stop Telltale games are any indication, there is a huge market for it. Ready at Dawn clearly had a product to sell that would have done extremely well with this market.  They obviously have talented people who understand emotion and storytelling, and artists that are second to none.  But Sony didn’t want them to make that game.  They wanted a system seller.  A block buster exclusive with universal appeal, and they told the marketing people to go out and make EVERYONE want to play it.  So instead of The Walking Dead, which absolutely delighted everyone who bought it by delivering exactly what was expected (an electronic comic where sometimes you need to hit buttons), The Order delivered too much game play for people who came for the Story, and too little game play for people who came for that.  It will be remembered as a failure, and rightly so … but it’s not Ready at Dawns failure.  They delivered.  They delivered the right people, the right parts, and every component necessary to make something great, but the publisher put it together without looking at the instructions, and marketing didn’t bother to read the brochure.

*I think it’s safe to say inverse is also true; if you were to somehow grab a Pong fan from the 1960 and show him games on the Xbox One or PS4, I don’t think he would be able to identify them as future versions of Pong.

Off Streaming – BloodBorne

It’s Tuesday, and the absolute best type of Tuesday; on that delivers a highly anticipated release.  But sometimes the mainstream isn’t for everyone.  Is there something off-steam that might offer a similar experience at a lower price or on more systems?

Blood Born is a fantastic game that doesn’t just continue the traditions of From Software but somehow improves on them in every possible way.  It’s an absolute masterpiece, and one of the best next gen games we’ve been given so far.  But what if you don’t have a PS4?  What if you’re still working on Dark Souls 2 and don’t want something too similar?  Or maybe $60 is simply too rich.  Where can you get a BloodBorne (or From Software) like experience from something other than a From Software game?

Enclave

Developer: Starbreeze Studios

Publishers: TopWare Interactive, Vivendi Games, Conspiracy Entertainment

Platforms: Xbox, Microsoft Windows, Wii

Released: July 19, 2002

Availability and price:  Less than $1 on steam until March 30th, $5.99 on GOG.com

Like From Software games, Enclave is an extremely unforgiving and dark experience.  Although combat is more direct and less nuanced, a reaction based defense system which is far from optional will keep you on your toes. Absolutely brutal encounter design and enemy placement makes every decision counter as soon as you get past the first few levels, while failure comes at a heavy price.  The long, open levels have only a few deviously placed checkpoints, but Enclave ups it to 11 by setting a gold cost for each check point used.  If you’re not able to survive long enough and collected enough gold between deaths you might find yourself restarting a level even with all the checkpoints unlocked.

Game play is complex and satisfying.  Although the absence of controller support seems a bit odd on the PC the keyboard and mouse control set up works well enough, and controller support can be added with 3rd party software like Pinnacle Game Profiler.  Rather than build up a single character, you start each level by choosing a class to play and equipment to start with based on what you have unlocked and the gold you have collected throughout pervious levels.  This allows you to customize your load out to the task at hand or experiment with different play styles on the fly. There is a good mix of magic using, melee, and ranged classes to keep things interesting, and each feels just similar enough that you can play a single level as them without being lost, but different enough that the experience is fresh.

Where Enclave really shins is in how it takes you through a dark and morally ambiguous story from both sides.  You play as evil classes like lich or assassin in the dark campaign or your standard do-gooders like druid or Knight in the light campaign.  Both stories offer something completely different with only a few shared levels between them. Even these are mixed up and modified from one side to the other, with you starting at a different location and fighting to a different goal.  The maps and environments have aged nicely, although the visuals overall are obviously dated (with the cut scenes being particularly painful).  And although the bosses don’t hold a candle to what you see in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, they are nonetheless enjoyable and entertaining, and the occasional puzzle sequence to break the action is handed well.

All and all, Enclave certainly isn’t Bloodborne, but it offers a lot of the same things for less than a cup of coffee.  If you’re sitting at home today with nothing new to play, green with envy of your PS4 owning friends … you really can’t go wrong with this forgotten gem.

We Should Stop: Simply Calling Games "Difficult"

We Should Stop: Simply Calling Games "Difficult"

In We Should Stop, The Head Pirate looks the things we all say and do as gamers, and picks apart the things we all do but really shouldn't.

Defining difficult is … what’s the word for it …

When you put a simple game of chance under the microscope, you can learn quite a bit about the most common mistakes we make when speaking to a games difficulty.  Picture a game where you role a 20 sided dice and “win” on a roll of 1-10 while you lose on a roll of 11-20.  In mathematics we call this type of game “fair”; you win as often as you lose.  There are a number of ways could modify the game to be “unfair”, the most obvious is to change the range of winning and losing values. We could also use a “loaded” dice where the probability of landing on any given value if not uniform, changing the games mechanics, or could add additional rules to the game, like saying you can never win on the same number twice in a row.  But have we made the game any more or less difficult?

Although we've modified the chance of winning and losing we haven't changed what has to be done to complete the game. The TASK required to reach a result is the same, and this task serves as a meaningful definition of game-play .  The only thing you have any control over is if you successfully manage to roll a dice such that it lands on a face and can be read.  As anyone who has ever had friends over for board games on far too small a table can attest, it’s hardly a guarantee … but few would call this task difficult.  As such, we need language to separate a game that requires you to do something that requires a high level of skill, like tossing a dice between a series of rings for the toss to count as a way of making you win less frequently, from other games that ensures you win less frequently by saying you only win if you roll three 20s in a row.  In the first instance, game-play is far more difficult, while in the second who wins or loses is still determine entirely by chance*

All your base(line)

When we move over to Video games it’s often less obvious what is the task we have control over and what is left to chance, and frequently they overlap.  To understand this, we’ll take a look at an action sequence that requires reactive button inputs like a boss fight in Devil My Cry, Bayonetta or Dark Souls (or any other brawler type game).  In this scenario the “boss” will use a combination of abilities with various telegraphs which require you to use correct counters, each mapped to a different button on the controller.  If you are successful, the boss takes damage and if you fail you take damage instead.  The encounter plays out in a set order; that is to say the boss uses the same attacks in the same order every time it is attempted.  This task is entirely skill based and has no random component which allows us to assign it an arbitrary rating of difficulty: let’s say 10. We’ll very quickly notice an interesting anomaly.  Although the encounter never changes, people who have played though it a number of times will have a higher success rate as they are able to apply both reflex and memory to the task.  Therefor any meaningful definition of difficulty must allow for that success rate to increase with repetition.  Practice might not make perfect, but for a task to be defined as “difficult”, it has to have some measurable effect.

With a baseline defined, we can look at ways of changing the experience and what effect that has on the difficulty using the arbitrary scale given above.  We already understanding that difficulty refers to a task, and that the task here is reacting to a telegraphed attack with the correct input using both reflex and memorization.  By lowing the amount of time we are given to input the correct response we can made that task more challenging without changing the structure of the task itself.  If, for example, we have 1 second to react in the game we gave an difficulty rating of 10 to, with only half a second might have a difficulty of 15, while a game that gave you 2 seconds to react would have a difficulty of 5.  This limits a meaningful discussion of “difficulty” to platformers, brawlers, fighting games, and other games where the primary challenges come from some primarily reflex based task.  Within these categories, this difference is rather obvious.  It’s easy to argue that Super Meat boy is more difficult than Super Mario brothers, or Street Fighter is more difficult than Mortal Kombat or Skull Girls.  But what about changes that effect something other than difficulty but still make it less likely we’ll complete the encounter?  What can we call them?

Getting Subjective

Most commonly, we would see this type of encounter move away from scripted attacks towards random patterns that are different every time it’s attempted.  Although this gives a perception of making the encounter more challenging by forcing the players to use reflex alone, that’s not really what happens.  The player is still building and applying memory to the individual telegraphs, and that’s good news for our definition; the encounter is still difficult.  Only now instead of a set difficulty of 10, it would be a range of values based on what exactly the random sequence ends up being.  This can be a problem when trying to review or talk about a game that utilizes this technique.  One reviewer might end up getting a random difficulty (using our arbitrary scale) of 5 and say the encounter was too easy, while another might get a random difficulty of 15 and say it’s too hard.  Both are correct, as the experience is now subjective. CCG and puzzle games are the most common example of this type of subjective difficulty, although it can be quite prevalent in RPG games, particular in boss fight.  It’s clear that the type of gamer who enjoys playing Magic That Gathering is generally different from a gamer who enjoys competitive Street Fighter, so this distinction from games with objective or set difficulty is extremely important.

The Unforgiven

Adding a life bar, or same amount of variability to the number of times we need to succeed at entering the correct inputs or the number of times we can fail to do so is another common way a developer might modify difficulty.  By forcing the player to “pass” a given challenge (set of tasks) 3 times in a row, for example, the developer will significantly lower the number of times the attempted encountered is completed successfully.  In addition, the developer could force you to reply content before you get the opportunity to retry the encounter you failed, both increasing the amount of time that needs to be invested in each attempt, and limiting your minds ability to form muscle memory (as you are forced to shift to other tasks to fight your way back to the failed encounter).  Some games may even take it a further as a single mistake forces you to restart the game from the beginning.  Even in these extreme cases, however, the difficulty of the gameplay remains unchanged; we perceive the game as harder because the time investment needed to successfully complete it is increased.  It’s quite literally the oldest trick in the developer’s handbook.**

Going back to our definition of difficulty, we were careful to separate things the player has control over from random events.  The trick in this type of modification is that it misrepresents player’s short term (immediate) skill level as controllable when it isn't.  Although we can get better at things over time, how good we are at something right now is a set number which can be defined as a probability of succeeding at a given task.  For example, if you are able to complete an encounter with a difficulty of 10 (using our arbitrary scale from above) 50% of the time, how often you succeed at that take 3 times in a row is a simple function of portability outside your control.***  More importantly, we've learned nothing about this players ability or skill. He may simply have “lucked out” and preformed the task at the absolute limit of his abilities multiple times and be completely unable to complete a task with a higher difficulty.  On this plus side, this can lead to an extreme feeling of gratification when a player achieves a sequence of successes which, to them, seems far more difficult than it actually was.

Games that utilize this technique are so popular that it’s spawned an entire genre (roguelike) and games like BloodBorne  or Dark Souls have received almost universal praise for their use of this technique.  This is why it’s so important to be able to talk about them using the right language.  Given the vast variation in core difficulty (or difficulty in task) of different rougelike games which are enjoyed by the same type of gamer, it’s obvious the sought after property is something independent of it.  In the business and legal worlds we call being able to fail (or default) at something without penalty “forgiveness”, and so it makes sense that we label these games as unforgiving.

Is this getting too complex?

Last but not least, addition rules and button combinations could be added to the encounter.  There is an appreciable difference between pressing “x” to react to an attack and pressing x, y, x, x, x while holding left, a and b at the same time.  Alternately, the rules could change throughout the encounter; if you pressed “x” three times in a row, the next time you should press “x” you need to press “y” instead.  Unlike difficulty, which focuses primary on reflex but allows for memory as well, this type of game focuses almost entirely on memory and cognitive ability to define a new way and encounter can present a challenge.  This is even clearer when you look at turn based and strategy games which eliminate reflex skill although while still maintaining meaningful differences from each other in terms of challenge.  I don’t think anyone would say that Civilization is any easier than Crusader Kings, but Crusader Kings has a much larger number of systems which the player needs to keep track of.  These games are best evaluated by the number of systems and mechanics the player is required to track and master, best labeled as the level of complexity.

The Final Word

In a perfect world, we call Super Meat Boy a game with extremely high objective difficult that is very forgiving and not complex, while we say BloodBorne has moderate subjective difficulty and complexity, while being extremely unforgiving.  Civilization has low subjective difficulty and a high level of complexity.  Only then do we all mean the same thing when we talk about a game’s challenge.  As it is now, we boost about clearing a game on nightmare or making it though hard-core mode while that doesn't necessarily measure skill.  More importantly, reviews and media lack a powerful tool in matching games with the people who enjoy them.  I personally don’t enjoy unforgiving games or subjective difficultly, but I love complexity and games that are objectively difficult, while my wife will spend hours perfecting a subjectively difficult, insanely unforgiving game, but can’t stand complexity.  As far as any gaming review site is concerned, however, we both like “hard” games.

I think we can do better.

* We seem to understand this and use different language outside of games.  Although the chances of winning the lottery are far smaller than the chances of becoming a millionaire by going to school to be a doctor and developing a successful practice, no one would ever say winning the Lottery is more difficult.  We clearly see the “task” of becoming a doctor being more difficulty then the “task” or buying a lottery ticket, and don’t confuse chance of success the same way we do with games.

**When Video games first came into being, this was the first trick developers used to make games more challenging to increase their length.  A game which offered no continues was perceived as “harder” then one that didn’t regardless of the difficulty of the tasks the player was being asked to do.

***You would succeed .50 * .50 * .50 percent of the time, or 12.5%