He Turned Us Into Killers

Wake Up and Smell The Ashes

 Maybe it will fade with time, but Spec Ops: The Line has had a large impact on the way I perceive and approach shooters. Much like The Incredibles and Watchmen made me reconsider how superhero stories should be told, Spec Ops seems to have shifted what I look for in video game shooters specifically, and possibly in video games as a whole. Time will tell.

Previously, the best modern war game I had played was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. While the sequels devolved into Michael Bay absurdity, the first game in the Modern Warfare series presented a scenario perfectly pitched to play on post-9/11 fears while skillfully using the first person perspective to enhance the drama. Its story was extreme without being ridiculous, and felt believable. It still had the respectful tone towards war and soldiers which previous games in the series maintained.

It also, of course, went out of its way to make you the hero in the end. The last, slow motion sequence where the player shoots Zakhaev is one of my favorite examples of melding gameplay with cinematic trappings. After saving the world from the brink of nuclear war, you got to personally take out the diabolical mastermind behind it all. Badass status confirmed.

Spec Ops assumes you are literate in the genre it attempts to deconstruct, then forces you to confront the things you've done and why you play these games. Killing white dots from the AC-130 in Modern Warfare was a disquieting take on the way the US hunts its enemies today, but you were never forced to see the screaming victims who weren't lucky enough to be obliterated instantly. You were a force of righteous American justice, so why should you care? Spec Ops makes you hear the screams, see the missing limbs, and literally asks if you still feel like a hero. The game is still meaningful if you aren't as familiar with your standard military manshoot, but I feel the impact is lessened if you haven't shot waves of generic foes in Modern Warfare or listened to the chatty, snappy dialogue of your bros in Gears of War.

Spec Ops isn't perfect. It goes pretty far in making you feel like a standard military shooter badass. Headshots cause a short, dramatic slo-mo, and during an initial playthrough, you are bombarded with reminders of how far you have to go to unlock its many achievements. When many games pop up an achievement just for hitting the start button on the main menu, not being more subversive with the achievements in particular feels like a missed opportunity.

Perhaps we had to have games like Gears of War, Modern Warfare, and Army of Two in order to get to the point where developers are actively trying to make something different in reaction to them. Indie games seem to be perceived as the go-to place for "meaningful" games, for whatever reason. But we're getting to the point where triple-A games are moving beyond winks and nods to their influences and more towards actual commentary and incisiveness. There are more and more options available for games with good writing and thoughtful presentation while still retaining responsive gameplay and player feedback. These are the games I'm more and more drawn towards. I've played enough mindless games.

February 2009 - The Month of DLC

February is looking to be an odd month when you look at some of the new videogame related stuff coming out. FEAR 2: Project Origin and Street Fighter IV are coming out, but it seems like the biggest new releases are for games we've already played.

Fallout 3, Burnout Paradise, Mirror's Edge, Tomb Raider Underworld and Grand Theft Auto IV are all getting new expansions to the original content they came with in some form or another. Developers now seem fully committed to extending the life of a game through new downloadable content, and now that the holiday crush is over, they want us to return to the games we rushed through earlier, or finally pick up the ones that we regretfully decided didn't make the cut for a purchase. I would love to see the sales figures for downloadable content from the last few years, but that information seems to be a closely guarded secret for reasons I don't understand.

In a way, Bethesda helped pioneer this brave new DLC frontier we're currently exploring. They still haven't lived down the overpriced horse armor they released for Oblivion, but the subsequent expansions they released were much more feature rich and sensibly priced. It sounds like the new stuff they have planned for Fallout 3 will take a lot of what they learned from their experiences on that earlier game. They all look like they're going to offer a substantial amount of content for the amount of money being asked for. The DLC for March will also fix one of the main complaints about the game: not being able to continue past the main quest.

Burnout Paradise of course has been receiving free content for the past year, but February's DLC will mark the first time an update is being charged for. There will also be a free patch to go alongside it, but the paid portion will test just how much goodwill has been built up over the past year from the free stuff. My worry is that this first premium pack seems to add features that nobody was really asking for, while not adding what people DO want. It adds a local multiplayer "party" feature where players pass around a controller and compete in challenges like the online multiplayer has. What people have actually asked for is a split-screen racing mode, but that has not been added in. The free patch will be adding a restart option for events, which will at least address the other large complaint many people have about the game. I still contend that pining for such an option misses the point of the game, but I'll live.

Mirror's Edge is getting a new pack of time trial levels for players to master. The interesting thing about them is that they're presented in a very different and abstract style compared to the levels in the main game and original time trials. As shown in the picture above, the new levels look to be purely a playground for the fast, fluid freerunning the the story mode only occasionally got right.

The DLC for Tomb Raider and GTA4 seem to be the most traditional. Tomb Raider simply adds a few new levels to explore that were cut from the main game. GTA4's episodic expansion, The Lost and Damned, will cost $20 and feels like the disc-based expansion packs that used to be sold for PC games a few years ago. It adds a new story and characters, but other than that we don't know much about it.

The first three examples are the most interesting to me because they all represent efforts by the developers to respond to player feedback. Mirror's Edge may be a happy coincidence, since the DLC for it was announced soon after the game was released, but otherwise we're finally seeing significant changes come to game instead of having to wait for a sequel to fix our collective gripes. It will be very interesting to see if The Lost and Damned has responded to the narrative and character complaints that people had about the original game. I think it would also be hilarious to hear the term "ludonarrative dissonance" mocked on one of the new radio or TV stations that will be added.

Responding to player feedback through patching has been pretty common on the PC for years, but it's new for consoles, and monetizing it is new to both sides. Bethesda once again seems to have paved the way for paid downloadable content on the PC with Oblivion and Fallout 3. Valve has released a slew of free updates for Team Fortress 2, but will be forced to charge for them on the Xbox 360. Infinity Ward released several free map packs for Call of Duty 4 yet charged for them on both the Xbox and Playstation 3. I'm frankly surprised that there wasn't more of an uproar from PC gamers when the Oblivion content was released. Except for the horse armor, perhaps people felt that the content being offered was done so at a fair price. When you add in the fact that DLC may directly address the larger issues that players may have had with a game, it becomes worth the price even more.

Successful Experiment is Successful

The Great Game Watching Experiment of 2008 was, I think, mostly successful. We got all the way through Call of Duty 4 on the easiest difficulty. Even on that difficulty, there are parts of the game that were fairly difficult. It's interesting when you compare it to Halo or Half-Life and see the wildly different levels of difficulty that make up the so-called "Easy" setting.

Erin and Dan seemed to have trouble following the plot in certain points. COD4 in particular relies a lot on the loading screen between levels to set up the context for what's about to happen, and if you miss the information presented, either through text or voice overs, the following level won't always make much sense.

It was also interesting for me to replay the game with the intent of giving the other people in the room the best "view" of the action. I was acting as the director in a real sense, so I tried to make sure I was always facing where scripted actions were occurring so they wouldn't miss cool and interesting scenes. Sometimes I was successful, other times I don't think I was.

As I was playing I noticed where the game padded its length to fit more "game" in. I don't mean padded as in it needlessly made its length longer. I mean in the sense that there are sequences where the plot isn't advanced in order for the player to complete certain scenarios that are fun and exciting. Before, when I thought back on the game, I usually remembered the major plot points: the opening assassination, the nuclear blast, the utterly epic slow motion finale. I didn't really think about all the stuff that happened between those moments. COD4 could absolutely be condensed into an awesome action movie, I think. However, sequences like saving the disabled tank, the escape from the farm while calling in air strikes, and possibly the escape and standoff from Chernobyl didn't do much to advance the story. They're exciting to play, but for someone watching me play, it dilutes the main plot of the game and makes it hard to remember what's going on.

We'll be trying The Darkness next. It's got a story with a bit more emotional heft, and tells it a bit more traditionally as far as videogames are concerned. It has five acts, so I'm hoping we can do one act a night until we're finished.