31.08
2009

From Cradle To Enclave: Taking The Road Less Travelled In Fallout 3

> Author: Phil -- Category: Console, Narrative, PC
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There are many reasons to praise Fallout 3 but my favourite thing about the game is that it genuinely rewards exploration. Too many games these days create vast open worlds purely to pad out the distance between missions, with the odd collectible scattered here and there. In Fallout 3 whenever you enter a building you genuinely don’t know what to expect. Aside from the general missions are little vignettes; opportunities to gain some small reward, embark on a silly little mini-quest or learn background story about previous wasteland travellers. To prove this point I present an extract from the diary of Pliskin, my cannibalistic, kleptomaniac, saintly main-character:

I’d been clearing out the Marigold Station of fire ants when I found Grady. He wasn’t in great shape; maybe they’d got to him, maybe he couldn’t take the pressure and decided to go out on his own terms. It didn’t matter either way, his brains were dried into the walls now and I was the bastard lucky enough to find his last message to the world.

If you’re listening to this tape, then my brains are splattered all over a wall somewhere and you’ve got a job to do. You need to retrieve the package and get it safely to Ronald Laren in Girdershade. Tell him Grady sent you.

To get the package, you’ll need the key. I’ve stashed it inside an old fire hose case in some maintenance closet in Marigold Metro Station. The key will unlock the safe that contains the package. Look for the room marked by a spinning light… you can’t miss it.

Good luck, and hopefully they won’t find you too.

Sure it sounded dangerous, Grady could tell you that if he’d been able to tell anyone anything any more, but I was betting Ronald Laren would pay good money to get this package back. Luckily for me Marigold is a pretty small station; finding the firehose that hid Grady’s key didn’t take a whole lot of searching and pretty soon I’d found the spinning light that marked the location of the package, assuming no-one had got to it first.

In the room was a safe that seemed a likely home for the package. A quick check confirmed that it hadn’t been tampared with and I was the first to get here. As I unlocked the safe my pulse raced, the anticipation was almost unbearable. What could be inside? There’s always the chance that it would prove far too valuable to sell. If so Ronald Laren would be free to track me down. I’d be waiting. I opened the door.

What the fuck?

WHAT THE FUCK?

Before I’d had time to regain my composure I heard a sound from the door. Someone was coming.

You’ve picked a really bad time to be giving demands, buddy.

As Lug-Nut’s head exploded I’d made my decision, one way or another Ronald Laren was going to pay dearly for wasting my time. Money or blood I didn’t care, there was a cost for my services and he was getting the bill.

On the other hand the ‘Naughty Nightwear’ was surprisingly comfortable.

The journey through the wasteland to Girdershade was largely uneventful. I may have been sporting erotic pyjamas, but I find people rarely judge your fashion choices when you’re carrying a giant plasma rifle.

Mutant bears, in particular, are non-judgemental.

Finally I make it to Girdershade, with one thought in mind.

This place looks like a shithole. Ronald had better have more caps than his humble abode might suggest.

Luckily he’s a desperate man. I manage to extort 300 caps from him; partly for the nightwear and partly to avoid finding out what the business end of a fully charged plasma rifle feels like.

With that my personal odyssey was complete. I had searched high and low through an fire ant infested underground station, trekked the entire length of the Wasteland all to extort a large sum of money from a desperate pervert. All in all it had been a good day.

18.08
2009

Go With The Flow: Infamous and The Joy of Movement

> Author: Phil -- Category: Analysis, Console
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For the first time in years I find myself wandering through a game world with no specific purpose. Nothing is left to do, missions have been completed and side-quests fetched. Oh sure, there are the inevitable collectibles to get but I’m not actively going after them. Instead I’m just happy to exist in the world.

This doesn’t happen often. The last time I spent any amount of time in a game world after completing everything the game had to offer was probably San Andreas, I was happy enough to get in a tank and roll over a few hundred cars, or head for the Harrier in my airfield and go bother the local military base.

The strange thing is that Infamous is a less successful open world than any in the GTA series. With the missions gone there is actually very little to do and the world itself just isn’t particularly interesting.

The reason I’m spending so much time there can actually be traced back to a gameplay mechanic that has built in popularity since 2007; its all down to the movement.

It started, or at least I first noticed it, in Assassin’s Creed. Despite the repetitive nature of the game’s mission structure I happily played it through to the end. The thing that captivated me, above all else was the flow of Altair’s movement and the ease of which it could be achieved by the game’s controls. Importantly this wasn’t platforming, with the genre’s need for inch-perfect accuracy; but instead something almost akin to a racing game, leaving you free to plan your escape route or even suddenly change direction when required to shake off guards.

If there was a problem with the movement in Assassin’s Creed, and there was, it was perhaps too removed from player control at times. The climbing was fine but traversing rooftops was simply a matter of holding down a button. It worked and was a smooth system, but taking away that last element of control sometimes left it feeling like the game was playing on autopilot. It was for this reason that when I finally finished the game I was, in fact, finished with the game.

The next year saw the release of Mirror’s Edge. A completely different beast from Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge was a platform game. It’s innovations in the genre, however, went far beyond the first-person perspective. Mirror’s Edge focused on the tactile. It worked because the actions you were asked to perform felt weighty and realistic; you had to consider velocity and momentum. Rather than wrestle control away from the player it asked you to manage every aspect of it: Do you take this series of jumps and vault over a gap, or slide under those pipes and wall-run across? As much as I liked some of the ‘puzzle’ elements that asked for you to get to a door at the top by free-running across a series of seemingly unconnected areas, the real thrill of the game came from those moments where the path became obvious and you were left to feel your way through it.

The problem with Mirror’s Edge is that the developers seemingly didn’t have the strength of conviction to follow through with their mechanic. Instead, in multiple places, you were forced to stop and deal with its terrible combat mechanic. I would have personally been happy if there had been no enemies in Mirror’s Edge whatsoever, but will accept that having a threat chasing you through sections of a level does add the thrill of outpacing and outwitting your foes. What the game should have never done is forced the player to stop and deal with multiple armed police before letting Faith move to the next section.

Which leads to this years release of Infamous… or inFamous. I should state categorically that Mirror’s Edge is by far the superior game. Where Infamous gets points is the ease in which the game allows you to traverse the city without ever taking away your control. It’s an intuitive system; Cole will snap to ledges and climbable bits of buildings, avoiding the fiddly nature of much modern platforming.

A few weeks ago I compared Prince of Persia to the skating system of the Tony Hawk’s games. If Prince of Persia represents the missions of the Pro Skater series, asking the player to flawlessly reach a certain location, then Infamous represents the bits in between. Yes, you could go straight to the mission objective, but you’re far more likely to take your time and bounce around the scenery. There are even rails that electrically-powered Cole can grind along.

An interesting world to experience may contribute to my enjoyment of a game, but its a simple and satisfying motion mechanic that will keep me coming back long after I have any reason to do so. Long may it continue.