Compare this to an online game like SWTOR, where you could go through an entire battle with the top 90% of your screen blacked out and still have great odds of surviving.
Shamus has an uncanny ability to take what I’m thinking, what’s rolling around in the back of my mind, and articulate it, along with a bunch of other points I’ve never considered. He’s been methodically taking down SWTOR over the past couple of days, but this is the one that stood out at me.
In addition to his discussion about elites in Borderlands vs. SWTOR, I should point out that most World of Warcraft elites had names and were larger or coloured differently. It’s not as obvious as it is in Borderlands, but it is done much better than in TOR, where many characters have names but aren’t elites.
So I bought Global Agenda on it’s Steam Sale the other day, mainly because I think it’s an interesting idea. I like shooters, I like RPGs, why not combine them? Well, the obvious reason is that shooters and RPGs have two different philosophies. Shooters are based almost entirely on personal skill, on your ability to shoot. In an RPG, skill matters too, but your character’s stats are also incredibly important. It’s very possible to be too low level for an area, where in a shooter, you can usually make up for extreme difficulty with extreme headshots.
Now, I’m not a fan of unbalanced competition (i.e. Killzone 2’s online rank system), so I’m more interested in Global Agenda’s cooperative PvE gameplay. And frankly, I think it’s a great idea. I’ve spent four hours playing Global Agenda so far, split across two characters, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far.
Like most shooters, it’s quick to play. Even a situation that you might recognize as a “dungeon” (four characters attack an AI controlled camp, ending with a boss battle) takes a maximum of fifteen minutes - there’s a literal timer.
Also like other shooters, you can pretty much jump in right in. After the skippable tutorial and a few “quests” designed to teach you the talent tree, you can start queuing for these missions, and be quite effective!
And did I mention how short the wait time is? You can queue for these missions at any time, so right when I began a quest I queued, expecting a Warcraft-style 45 minute wait … I was thrown into a mission before I even left the quest hub!
It’s great for the same reason that Halo’s Firefight is popular. It’s fun to play shooters, it’s more fun to play with other people, and these missions take you and some other people, drop you in a mission, and let you rock and roll.
Unlike MMOs, your personal skill level makes a really notable difference in damage taken and dealt. Managing your power & using your jetpack to dodge while having enough power to shoot is an interesting mechanic, and it makes gameplay a lot more exciting than a Warcraft spell priority system. Fighting a boss really feels like fighting a boss, rather than just standing back and doing your spell rotation while ensuring you aren’t standing in fire. Even in solo play, ducking behind cover can help you last for much longer before having to rest; in something like Warcraft, if an enemy targets you, his spells can go through walls and cover, making that sort of pointless.
At the same time, the game also takes some of the more negative elements of these genres. For example, the open nature of the MMO style gameplay hampers your ability to learn to play. The tutorial does a great job of introducing the core gameplay elements, but once you’re dropped into the game world, you have a fair amount of other “stuff” that makes no sense. What the hell is a Boost? I found out by accident, but it isn’t very clear at all. same with weapon descriptions; I have “RIfle” and “Rifle [d]”. A simple explanation of what the letter codes mean seems to be important, because I see people in chat selling “Mega Rifle [d][d][r][p][w][n]”.
It’s also not as polished as a standalone shooter. When exploring my backpack, I have two different jetpacks; the default jetpack (“hands-free) and a second one. It turns out that the second jetpack doesn’t let you shoot while flying, but it has no benefit whatsoever compared to the default (i.e. it isn’t faster, it doesn’t let you fly further). It seems to me that this old jetpack is a remnant of how the game used to be played. Why new players have it in their inventory is beyond me. The game is full of little weirdnesses like that. And the interface is clunky as hell.
I gotta say this: Global Agenda is pretty great. I honestly have no idea why none of the news sites I read really mentioned this game (or maybe I just ignored them). I wouldn’t pay monthly for it, but for eight dollars and change it’s a great deal. For it’s regular price of $30? Well, I can’t totally say after only four hours of gameplay, but it seems solid overall.
WARNING: This post contains spoilers for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. I try to be general and avoid spoilers, and nothing I write about is very “high-level” spoilers regarding the overarching plot, but I mention specific plot elements regarding the beginning and end of the Vashj’ir zone, as well as the intro to Uldum. You have been warned.
As you may know, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has released and … well, it’s pretty popular. I’ve been playing myself and really enjoying Blizzard’s handiwork, as always. Yet one of their design philosophy changes irks me, and this is going to sound terrible out of context, but I think they’re trying too hard to tell their story.
Now, I respect and enjoy Warcraft’s extensive lore. It’s a huge, deep world with hundreds of characters, told through graphic novels, short stories on the Warcraft website, and novels. You might see some dull Mage standing in Dalaran looking bored, 99% of players will never realize that he’s already saved the world (or something).
Blizzard, understandably, wants to start presenting this story to it’s players in some way other than quest text. Since launch, they’ve been experimenting with different ways to tell their story; cutscenes, scripted combat encounters, and phasing. Unfortunately, Blizzard has begun to abuse their storytelling techniques, harming both the gameplay, but also the story.
In Wrath of the Lich King (the expansion prior to Cataclysm, also known as WotLK), Blizzard experimented with an in-game cutscene where control is taken away from the player while a video is shown; prior to this, all plot exposition was told through quest text or shown in-game, where it is often promptly interrupted or skipped past. And it was pretty damned cool. So they started using more cutscenes in Cataclysm. Unfortunately, these cutscenes aren’t nearly as interesting, and they also tend to be incredibly railroady, showing that Blizzard is more interested in telling their story rather than letting you explore it. Need an example? This is a video of somebody starting the Uldum quest-chain. In short, the people there requested your aid with guarding them as they ride to some city. Go ahead and skip to the 1:40 mark. I’ll wait.
How terrible is that? While it might be humourous to watch a Hyena terribly leap out and ambush you, and watching your character do the /rude emote was amusing, it’s still the most absurd cutscene I’ve seen in ages. Your entire caravan simply gives up. Now, I’m not a pro Warcraft player by any means, but my character has slain demigods, travelled through time, tamed dragons, defeated the mighty Lich King as well as otherworldly invaders, and generally been quite the epic hero. And when ambushed, he simply gives up? Hell, I’m a Hunter, my cute Polar Bear could have easily gathered up all those ambushers to let me wreak havoc on them. It’s entirely unbelievable, and it’s a narrative device known to pen & paper gamers across the world as “railroading”, where the storyteller wrests control from the characters to tell the story he or she wants to tell, rather than letting the plot realistically unfold. Now I accept a bit of narrative control on Blizzard’s part; a Kraken destroying my ship is fine and exciting. But I don’t accept that my level 83 character was ambushed by six pygmys and their dog; it made me not care about that story because it was unbelievable. He should at least have put up a fight.
Even worse, the cutscenes are often poorly constructed and don’t work very well. Reviewing that ambush, we see a single hyena leap out of a wall, your character makes a rude gesture, and then the camera sweeps out to reveal six, seven enemies, all out of attack range. It’s poorly constructed both in terms of WoW gameplay (most good solo specs would have stood a chance there, and most of the Pygmys were even out of aggro range), and Blizzard’s direction went for cheap jokes rather than intimidation. Hell, it’s a cutscene; why not be surrounded by hundreds of pygmys? I have another video to demonstrate a poorly constructed cinematic. This video is much longer, so skip to 8:40. It does show the final quest in the Vashj’ir zone, so be forewarned.
How bad is that? Erunak (the pale guy with the long speech I recommended you skip) lets out a pitiful whine, a tentacle whips around, and then he just vanishes. Presumably he was supposed to be grabbed by the tentacle, but obviously the game engine was not up to the task. Note one of the comments of that video:
ty for uploading, now i got to see it without horrible bugs. i got stuck in the submarine for 15-20 mins, only seeing parts of dialogues (which were different from yours, oddly enough) and during the cutscenes the camera angle was off, for example only showing the tip of naga tail for a long time while that female naga was talking (-IsilionNELE)
Wait wait wait, this is the version without horrible bugs? This commenter’s experience mirrors mine; the camera didn’t show what was happening most of the time. Even worse, this entire quest is bugged; due to phasing errors (see below), it took me 9 attempts to actually start this series of events. It’s not just me; the comments on Wowhead indicate many other people are experiencing this failure. By the time the quest worked I didn’t give a damn about Blizzard’s story; I just wanted to complete this chain and get the hell out of this zone before Erunak phased out of existence, wasting even more of my time. And of course the ultimate cinematic leading up to the dungeon was an anticlimatic failure (see above). It’s clear that cutscenes aren’t easy to do in Warcraft; whether it’s a game engine issue or a problem with trying to do this in a MMO world (I’m guessing that), it just doesn’t work well, and it impacts the story. Nobody likes railroading, and even if we did, these cinematics are poorly done and flat-out buggy. But Blizzard has tried other ways to tell their story outside of cinematics; care to take bets on whether this is better?
They have implemented new tech known as ‘phasing’. Normally, in a MMO world, when I butcher a village of goblins they will respawn minutes later (hell, as I leave I’ll probably have to re-butcher the village just to leave). It’s obvious why this needs to happen; if I butchered the village before every other player and the goblins didn’t respawn … good luck completing that quest. Phasing technology allows me to butcher that village, and come back to find it still butchered. Maybe the next few quests I take will involve repopulating the village in the name of the Horde, and a few hours later it’s a flight point with shops and a quest hub. Meanwhile, by friend Charles might have begun this quest chain a few hours after I did, so while I’m putzing around my new quest hub he might be slaying goblins. It’s a rather cool idea, and it means that when you travel the gameworld, you can sometimes see your actual handiwork, which is awesome.
(Two things to clarify. First, this is different from instancing. An “instance” is an area created for you and your party, such as a dungeon. If my party is an instance and another party is in the very same dungeon, we each have our own mini-dungeon. But when you re-enter that instance next week, it’s reset. In phasing situations, a phased area exists in the normal game world, so I could see Charles and interact with him until he steps into his phased area of the game world. And phasing is permanent. Second, phasing only takes place in certain areas of the WoW world; if you butcher a goblin village, it generally respawns).
Phasing is pretty damned cool, but Blizzard only used it in a few areas of WotLK. I imagine it’s pretty technically tricky to implement, but the major danger with phasing is one they fell into with Cataclysm; they overused it.
Remember, World of Warcraft is at it’s heart a massively multiplayer online game. Let’s not forget that second ‘m’. When I tried to quest with my buddy Charles the other night, we found that we literally had no area we could quest together, because nearly everything important is phased. In Vashj’ir, you follow a group of Horde members from cave to cave as your group travels across the zone, learning more about the naga. Phasing is employed so you won’t see Erunak back at Legion’s Rest once he’s moved onto the Tenebrous Cavern. Sort of a cool idea, but completely, totally unnecessary, because the amount of phasing used causes technical glitches, such as the quest that wouldn’t start.
So I tried to join Charles in Vashj’ir, but he was further ahead on some quest chains than me, and as a result, the only time we could play together was between quest hubs. We’d swim together to my next quest, and he couldn’t see the monsters, so he’d stand around while I slew them. We ended up travelling to an area slightly too high level for us because neither of us had been there yet, ignoring the important plot that Blizzard was trying to tell, because phasing is too much of a pain in the ass. Furthermore, I wanted to just blaze through the quests so I could catch up to Charles, skipping quest text and all the plot just to try to reach him. Not a great way to tell a story. In short, phasing prevents you from playing together, and I feel it’s harmful in Cataclysm. It stops feeling like an MMO and starts feeling like several single-player games all taking place in the same area. The traditional MMO method to do this sort of thing, by the way, would simply to just have no phasing, and have Charles re-butcher goblin villages if he’s helping me out until I catch up to him. Sure, it’s sort of illusion breaking, but it still lets him play with me, and I vastly prefer it this way.
Speaking of gameplay, it’s time to write about Blizzard’s scripted encounters. Any longtime RPG player knows what I’m talking about; the time the young heroes encounter villains far, far too powerful to be defeated. A battle is cued, and you might get one or two attacks before your party is wiped out. But rather than a game over screen, the plot continues. Irritating, but it works.
The problem is that in Cataclysm, it doesn’t work. Going back to Vashj’ir (this zone is pretty much technically atrocious, but absolutely gorgeous), early on there’s a scripted encounter where you’re told to defend your fellow Horde from the Naga attack. It doesn’t specify a certain amount of Naga, so I just assume I need to defend until they tell me; easy enough. I headed our of our ship and begun butchering Naga. After about five minutes, I got confused; why wasn’t anything happening? As it turns out, you’re supposed to run away to let the Naga capture you. What? Of course, Blizzard can’t put that in the quest text, but they also apparently can’t script the encounter properly, so you have to fight the naga for a bit, then run away from a fight you’re handily winning … I actually had to temporarily dismiss my pet because he kept killing the Naga that were supposed to kidnap me.
Seriously, here’s the Wowpedia description for the quest. From the quest text itself: “We’ll defend this ship to our last breath, and make these naga scum think twice before approaching it again!”. Here’s how Wowpedia recommends you complete the quest: “Accept the quest, then swim outside. There’s a few phases. Stick close to Erunak and watch what the legionnaire says. When he says to ‘save yourself’, swim away. Players will be caught by a Zin’jatar Abductor and taken away to be saved by Erunak and a few other members of the Earthen Ring.”
Seriously? That’d make sense if the amount of Naga was overwhelming and my character was constantly being hammered by attacks, but I was able to butcher all the Naga pretty successfully. Why the hell would I run away? It’s more evidence of Blizzard railroading at work; they wanted a scene where your character would be kidnapped, and the only way to do that was to hope you’d eventually run away from the boring battle and let a Naga beat on you until he captures you. Pathetic. Let’s have some fun and check out the comments on this quest. Most commenters get stuck in a permanent loop. Some recommend you swim upwards to be captured. You have to not kill all the Naga, but you also can’t let them kill you either, making this very difficult with no other players around. But if too many players are around, they might kill all the naga, causing it to never end. And for icing on the cake, because of a poor implementation of phasing, it’s possible for you to be permanently unable to turn in other quests afterwards, so I hope you completed your quests in the order that Blizzard intended!
What a poor way to tell a story. Other scripted encounters include the Defending The Rift quest, where you have to repeatedly enter and leave a submarine until the game decides “OK, time for about five minutes of dull, expository dialogue”. Even better, cross your fingers that the plot characters don’t phase out, requiring you to abandon the quest and try again! (This is indeed the quest I was talking about earlier). And don’t even get players started on scripted encounters involving dialogue. Blizzard tried to include scripted plot exposition into a bunch of their Wrath dungeons, and generally just had players turn the music up over it because the Black Knight prattled on and on about the Scourge and how he was undefeatable … And let’s not forget that these are narrative problems I’ve found in early Cataclysm. None of them are directly related to the overarching plot. I can’t wait to see how bad the final zones are, because that is where they usually roll out the red carpet.
Cinematics, phasing, and scripted encounters all sound like great ways to help World of Warcraft have a more immersive story. The problem is that Blizzard is not only overusing these techniques, but they’re also using them poorly. Cinematics need to be exciting, phasing needs to be implemented in a way that still lets you actually play with your friends, and scripted encounters need to work properly. Furthermore, the plot Blizzard tells needs to be coherent with your own character’s story. A low level character can be believably captured by six pygmys and a hyena; a pimped-out godslayer should not. And for the love of all that is holy, they need to stop with the railroading. Narrative guiding is cool, but it’s just irritating and bothersome.
There are great other ways to tell an in-depth story. But these techniques are being abused in a game that technically doesn’t support them well, and in an environment that doesn’t support them. I play WoW for a number of reasons, and one of them is as a multiplayer game. When the story gets in the way of playing with my friends, I ignore it and chat with them until the story ends. When the story provides a great backdrop to our gaming together, I dig it. Because of how poorly the story has been told so far in Cataclysm, I just don’t care about it.
On one final note, I will offer a major suggestion on how to make a better storytelling experience for players. Every employee at Blizzard involved with the game itself should play Star Fox 64. Barring a short (>1 minute) cinematic prior to each level, all plot is told live, during combat, without interrupting the game. Bosses give a short, 10 second greeting before the battle begins in earnest. I never had to wait for Star Wolf to discuss his backstory with Fox and for my ship to be blown up by a gunshot I couldn’t see or avoid, listen to Star Wolf explain his evil plot, then be rescued. I could (and probably will) write about Star Fox’s narrative, but everyone at Blizzard should learn from it. The story should be interweaved into the gameplay and be a part of the game without interfering or railroading; the player should feel as if they are living the story rather than watching it.
Monday, July 23, 2012 at 11:30AM | tagged 