We shouldn't be saving the world on our own

Over the last twenty or so years, games have undergone monumental changes. Some games can now boast stories and worlds with the depth and excitement of books and films. If a player wants, they can spend hours reading up on the back story of the political intrigue between two factions or about this new companion who has just joined their party. Everyone can agree games now have a lot more about them then they did fifteen years ago when a deep plot consisted of chasing a dinosaur through multiple worlds because he'd stolen our princess; but there is one thing holding this development back. Saving the world single handed has become an outdated plot device in the modern game. Games developers love putting us in control of this one man who will have all the odds stacked against him, but still manages to come out on top. Be it through commanding units, managing an inventory or simply whacking things with a crowbar, this person will do everything by himself to rescue the world.

Now you might read this and scoff, it's a game, what's wrong with making the player feel all powerful? Games are supposed to be about enjoyment first and foremost. That's a fair statement; I have no problem with Soap McTavish scooting across the world in the teleport he must possess off camera. All I care about when playing Modern Warfare are the cool explosions and feeling like a badass with my heartbeat sensor. Games like Modern Warfare that don't depend largely on their story are free to use the sole saviour plot, they don't put much effort into their world so it's only natural there won't be much depth in saving it. There are other games however, that do take their story and their world very seriously indeed. One only has to look at the amount of writing that has gone into games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age to realise that these developers care a lot about the story behind their games.

Bioware in particular are zealots when it comes to creating worlds. Not content to just give you an impression on a world as you play through it, they bombard you with historical documents, cultural references, diaries and even the odd conversation just before the next wave of zombies. If they so choose, a player could probably add on several hours to their playtime if they stopped to read up on everything they found. This begs the question then, if Bioware go to such lengths to create these amazingly realised worlds, why do they resort to the same plot device as Duke Nukem? A deep believable world become less so when it depends on one man to solve all of their problems.

The Spectres and the Grey Wardens are similar in that they are the elite soldiers of their worlds and have been a force long before your character was even born. Both groups give their respective games a sense of history beyond your playtime and are the last bastions of defence against forces threatning to destory their worlds. It's a clever piece of storytelling as it allows the developers to put your character in a position where he can go about saving the world. It gives the story much more credibility than simply having your character start off as a farmer killing rats and ending up as a warrior-mage slaying gods. However while these groups sound good in theory, they both become irrelevant as you play through the games. In Mass Effect the only other Spectre I knew about was my enemy and in Dragon Age all the Grey Wardens were dead. On both occassions I entered baby-faced to these prestigious elite organizations which had kept the world safe for years, only to find the task of saving the world thrust upon my shoulders without any of their help. It seems a shame to think that these groups, which were extensively written about, were only used as a means of putting your character in the position to save the world on his own.

So why then is saving the world single-handedly so favoured by games developers? With good writing saving the world can feel epic. Mass Effect is a great example of how exciting a grandiose storyline can be. Saving the world can sometimes feel cliched and somewhat boring in a lot of games, but Bioware knows it has the writing staff to pull it off. However what's wrong with saving the world as a part of a team? No I don't mean the handful of other guys who follow me around, shooting aimlessly at stuff, I mean as a team in the larger sense. If I was part of the Grey Warden retaliation after Ostegar or one of the many Spectres the council sent after Saren, the game would have been much more believable, as well as keeping that epic feel to it. I could still partake in exciting missions, but the whole world wouldn't be balanced on the completion of it. The Grey Wardens and the Spectres have so much written about them, they should be used as more than just a starting point for the story. When so much effort goes into creating this huge believable world then it should come into action and become more than just a backdrop.

Games developers need to rid themselves of the notion that the player has to do everything himself to bring the bad guy down. Give the already established factions a hand in the war, even if it's just an off screen story telling device. You don't have to throw the world at a player to make him feel like he's in this epic situation, with good writing saving the dog can feel just as epic as saving the planet. I want to feel like a person in this amazing deep world you have created for me, not a god.

Indie games can breathe new life into an industry gone stagnant.

Was it really a surprise to anyone that the recent edition to the Call of Duty series changed nothing but the artwork on the cover? Or will it be a surprise to anyone when the next big MMO to come out from Bioware turns out to be the same as its pointy eared companion over at Blizzard? Now through the tumultuous "teenage" years, the gaming industry has settled down to the steady life of a 9-5, content with what it has, and who can blame it? Call of Duty: Black Ops has now become the highest selling game of all time.If Treyarch had decided they wanted to push the boat out by introducing a Sims type needs bar, where once every few missions you had to take a break from headshotting Russians and find a nice diner to chow down and relieve yourself, they would probably recieve a mild golf clap from the press for trying to change a bread and butter linear shooter, and then swiftly get the boot from Activision because they've just ruined the multi-million dollar money spinner that is the Call of Duty franchise.

Like it or not, that's what it's generally all about now, money. You can't have an industry sky rocket in popularity without having those who will seek to gain profit off it, and indeed if it wasn't for those people the industry probably wouldn't be the titan it is today. Are these people the scourge of video gaming? Should we go back to the days where our developers worked from their basements in cotten slacks and Metallica t-shirts? Who knows, this isn't what this article is about. Main stream games have gone past their experimental phase for the most part. If a developer risks producing something new, something genuinely different; if it fails he now has a lot of angry people who gave him a lot of money to answer to. This however does not mean the death of all things innovative, there are still people out there willing to experiment, people who don't have the huge financial pressure of a corporation bearing down upon them. The indie dev!

Over the last few years indie developers have flourished under the changes to the games industry. Mainstream games companies are now releasing their tools, engines and platforms on which to advertise and sell games, all this means that more and more independent developers are able to create and show their work. These developers don't have to adhere to any higher authority meaning they can create their own game, in their own time without worrying about whether or not it will turn a profit. When you couple those two facts together, you get the re-emergence of the old experimental phase in games development. In the last few years alone we've gotten titles such as Sleep is Death, World of Goo and Minecraft, all extremely different games to most of the titles you'll see in the mainstream. So do we leave it at that? The high production, multi-million dollar games will use the safe, tried and trusted methods we've all seen before, and the homemade low budget games will be there if anyone gets bored of shooting the same Vietnamese soldier over and over again. Or could these two opposite ends of the spectrum combine every once in a while to create something brilliant.

Since indie developers don't have the pressures of the high-budget guys why not let them test the water, with the growing exposure on low-budget games it's quite easy to see what people like and don't like. Then, when an indie dev has created something that has a large following, the big corporations can sweep in and hire these guys and give them access to all the resources at their disposal to create something bigger and better. I'm not for one minute suggesting that all indie games actually need a large brand name to come in and pick it up, many of the lower budget games are brilliant in their own right. But for every indie developer who just wants to create something small and unique, there should be another who wants to see their work taken into the big stage. Valve are great at this, back in 2005 they spotted Narbacular Drop, a game created by the students of DigiPen institute of technology. They spotted the potential this game had, so they hired the team and gave them all the resources in Valve and we now have Portal because of it. The same happened for Turtle Rock with Left 4 Dead and Icefrog with Defence of the Ancients 2.

It's pointless to criticise games like Call of Duty for sticking to what makes them money. Tell a developer at Treyarch that they didn't have the balls to make any significant changes and they'll just quote their sales figures back in your face. But Valve also have outstanding sales figures, and they could happily vomit out Half-Life sequels every year and be rich because of it. But they don't, the release date for the latest Half-Life sequel remains a mystery because it simply isn't ready yet. Instead, they're happy to experiment and try new things, giving indie developers a chance to make their work famous at the same time. I wonder if Activision will hold off on a Call of Duty sequel next year because it's not "ready".