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.
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