Removing the “Role-Playing” from Combat in FPSRPGs

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the game on everyone’s lips at the moment. Creating a successor to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time is quite a difficult feat, and it will of course mean that everyone will nitpick at every detail to the nth degree. But while everyone is screaming bloody murder over the highlighted objects or the cut scene takedowns, what got my attention was the combat. It wasn’t the fancy augmented moves Jensen can perform, or the flashy graphics, what struck me is that this is an FPSRPG that finally shoots like a First Person Shooter.

Deus Ex along with System Shock was one of the first commercially successful games to create this new genre, a hybrid of the behind the screens number game of the RPG and the incessant clicking of the FPS. But for all Deus Ex’s strengths, and there are plenty, it can’t count the combat as one of them. Even diehard Deus Ex fans will tell you to just pick up a rifle and sneak through the whole game, because combat simply isn’t that much fun. Deus Ex can’t shrug off those criticisms by hiding behind its release date either, even games pre-dating it had much better combat on display, Half-Life being a good example.

The weakness of Deus Ex’s combat came from the other half of this new genre, the RPG. Now that stats were put into everything, guns had to adhere to their numbers game, rather than any form of logic. The combat in Deus Ex was burdened by having to invest points into being able to shoot effectively. If you didn’t put enough points into your rifle skill then you had to riddle an enemy full of bullets before he would eventually collapse. While the inclusion of RPG elements obviously offered a lot more depth to Deus Ex than any other pure FPS had brought to the table, in some ways it crippled the game.

The FPS/RPG is now a well known genre, however despite the fact System Shock and Deus ex created this genre over ten years ago, developers have been falling into the same pitfalls over and over again. Bloodlines, Borderlands, Fallout 3 and New Vegas all integrate the RPG part into their combat and they all suffer for it. Bloodlines was fantastic up until the sewers where the combat really kicks in and I’m sick of throwing grenades at enemies in Fallout only to see nothing happen to them because my explosive skill wasn’t high enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want pure shooters to take over again. The RPG part in all these games keeps them fresh, it’s no surprise the playtime of Fallout 3 for example is over thirty hours where pure shooters like Modern Warfare or Bulletstorm only reach about six. But the RPG part has to only be used in places where it’s

applicable. To generalise for a moment, FPS’ usually have the better combat and RPG’s will have the better story, characters and dialogue, of course there are examples to prove this rule wrong, but generally it’s true. So why can’t FPSRPG’s take up that model? Instead of merging everything together, use each genre to its strengths. Keep combat purely FPS driven, no gun stats, no behind the screen dice rolls to see if I actually shot my enemy in the head, just keep it pure and simple. Then the RPG parts can be used outside of combat. Skills like lock picking, speech, bartering, hacking, we’ve seen them all before, and we’ve all had to neglect one or two because picking up a skill in how to shoot was, unfortunately, more important.

So far from what we've seen of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it seems as if Eidos have picked up on this. Fighting looks action packed and most importantly fun. Some will baulk at the idea of removing the RPGness from combat, but they’ll eventually get past it when they find that the RPG part of the FPSRPG shines when people aren’t firing guns.

5 Reasons: Why Portal is a great game.

Portal, the dark horse included in the Orange box, has achieved universal acclaim since its release in 2007. The internet is now full of cake jokes and “Still alive” is probably the most recognisable song in a video game to date. In this article I’m going to try and list five reasons, not just why it’s such a successful game, but also what its success can teach gaming as a whole.

1.      Even my mom has finished Portal: I’ll be the first to admit I’m awful when it comes to puzzle solving in games. While everyone else was having fun with Guybrush Threepwood and his chums, I was stuck trying to figure out how to open the door with a carrot and some marbles. I couldn’t even blow out pretentious hot air with the rest of my forum buddies over Braid because I was too busy being mocked by that last jigsaw piece on World 2. But I finished Portal... and so did my mother, and my girlfriend, neither of whom touch games and repeatedly scold me for my hobby.

We’ve all finished Portal because Portal is accessible. Most of the game is basically a tutorial, but we either don’t notice or care because playing through it is so much fun. Valve have found a way to gradually lead us through these puzzles at exactly the right pace, where you can be challenged in a way that’ll make you stop and think, but crucially not for too long. In my first play-through I never felt that familiar feeling of inadequacy and frustration I usually get from trying to solve puzzles, but at the same time I got the elation when I finished it. That sort of level design is top notch and extremely difficult to do. 

2.      A short game is not a bad game: When people talked about the more negative aspects of Portal, one phrase was trotted out again and again, “It’s such a pity it was so short”. This isn’t a criticism reserved for Portal alone either, any game that doesn’t span past the 10 hour mark will be admonished for it. RPG’s tended to be the only game that could span a campaign over a long period of time, but with the ever increasing amount of game categories, (open world games, sandbox games, multiplayer games), gamers these days expect playtime to reach upwards of 15 hours.

But there is a lot to be said for the short game. Portal has a play time of about 3-5 hours which is exceptionally short for a game, even an FPS these days spans about 8 hours and they usually include multi-player too, which increased the play time ten- fold. But because of Portal’s short play-time it is absolutely packed with gold. At the risk of drooling on to my keyboard, each minute is lovingly crafted and the style, humour and challenge of the game never wanes for a second. A game that lasts upwards of 30 hours is bound to have some sections that drag, and is going to include part that are merely more than filler, (Orzammar caverns anyone?). If Portal went on for another five hours, GLaDOS’ pitch black humour could have lost its edge, the challenges may have become boring and most crucially it mightn’t have had people begging for more. Portal 2 comes out later this year and Valve have said it’s going to be four times as long. I would be extremely surprised if they manage to stretch the gold over a period that long.

3.      But they need to be priced right: Aha, nearly got you there! Of course when you talk about the length of a game the price has to be integrated within that. Creating a fantastic three hour long game that’s priced equally to Bethesda’s latest 70 hour epic is going to earn you quite a lot of ire. Portal was originally released with the Orange Box which included Half-Life 2 along with its two episodes, and Team Fortress 2, all at the price of about 40 quid. That means Portal itself was priced at about eight Euros. I have no problem paying for shorter games if they’re priced accordingly. Eight Euros is cheaper than your average cinema ticket and they tend to be only two hours long.

Portal bore the brunt of most of the criticism over shorter games, but it began to pave the way for cheaper, shorter games to be sold digitally. We now have a host of games (mainly indie) that cost a tiny amount and while the play time isn’t massive the time you do spend with the game is excellent. We need to rid ourselves of the notion that games need to be a set length of time and start embracing games of varying length and price.

4.      Valve can write....pretty well: The amount of quotes, meme’s, jokes and nerd references that have come out of Portal is staggering. Just try and Google “The cake is a lie” and watch the thousands of sites pop up. In the first point I mentioned how Valve have mastered level design in this game, but the way Portal actually plays only makes it half the game, if that. The writing in Portal is sublime, in terms of writing in games it surpasses the fantastic narrative of the Half-Life series and should be put right up there with Planescape: Torment.

  

GLaDOS is possibly the funniest character to appear in a video game and the Companion Cube has managed to endear players worldwide without actually having any lines of dialogue. The writers in Valve managed to create GLaDOS without any proper conversation, the only lines written for it are one way and  are quite sparse up until the end. 50­+ hour long RPGs have mountains of dialogue and histories written about their characters yet most of them don’t have anywhere near the amount of appeal that this psychotic robot does. The Companion Cube is even more impressive. Despite being no more than just a crate coloured differently, the Companion Cube is loved by gamers everywhere. It has no lines, makes only a brief appearance in the game and...well, it’s a crate, yet anyone who’s played the game will harbour this inexplicable affection for it. Valve could have just given you a normal crate but they didn’t, and turning an inanimate object into something that is now a top marketing product, is writing at its finest. The writing in Portal serves an important lesson for all those other developers out there. Writing is crucial to a game; it’s not just an extra layer. People have this insane notion that only RPG’s need to have good writing and for every other genre it’s just a bonus. Portal, a puzzle game, lasted in people’s hearts and minds because Valve made a massive attempt to write something genuinely funny and, without that, Portal would not have succeeded to the extent that it did.

5.      There’s hope for us all: Portal is the spiritual successor to a game called Narbacular Drop, an independent game released in 2005 by the students of DigiPen Institute of Technology. Valve liked the idea and so hired the ten creators of the game and put them to work on Portal. This is a pretty heart-warming success story, yes, but it’s also important in the greater scheme of things. There are people out there creating some amazing games and the only thing that’s holding them back is their budget. Thanks to a few varying factors the last few years has seen a huge flourish in the indie market. Games like Minecraft, Braid and Sleep is Death to name a few are expanding the horizons of games past generic shooter #102 and that’s fantastic, but it can go further.

Valve have the right idea in picking these people up and giving them a budget to aid them in making their ideas real. Incidentally Valve didn’t just stop with Portal, this also happened to Turtle Rock with Left 4 Dead and Icefrog with Defence of the Ancients 2. Some smelly hippies will tell you that big name companies should leave indie developers alone, but as fantastic as these indie games are they could be even better with a budget behind them. Nerbacular Drop is probably great, I don’t know because I haven’t played it, but Portal is fantastic. I’m sure the students of DigiPen will tell you their original idea wasn’t hampered massively and Valve brought more to the table then they took away. 

A Few Thoughts On: Bulletstorm

A few months before the release of Bulletstorm a small demo emerged onto the internet called “Duty Calls”. Throughout the five minutes or so of game time the demo steadily mocked the Call of Duty franchise for its “boring” combat, predictable storyline and overly serious attitude. It ended in ridiculous fashion when you retrieved the “Nuclear Missile Bomb” from “The Leader Enemy Boss”, and then proceed to give the thumbs up while the American flag sprouts from your fingers. It was all very funny and well done, but why was this released on to the internet? The next caption read “Putting the Fun back into Gun, BulletStorm: Kill with Skill” and it all made sense. Just like the soldiers you play in the game, Epic Games and People May Fly weren’t afraid to piss off the bigger competitors and give them the finger while doing it.

In the campaign you play the foul-mouthed and seemingly indestructible Grayson Hunt. Betrayed by Sarrano his former commander, the ex-soldier dedicates his life to finding and killing said Commander. Ten years after the betrayal he runs into Sarrano’s ship in space and in a suicidal stunt manages to bring both ships down into the planet Stygia, a planet seemingly solely populated by people wanting to kill you.  The main, (some would say only) focus in Bulletstorm is its combat. The game throws a ridiculous amount of enemies at you and hands you even more ridiculous tools in which to dispose of them. Each weapon brings its own flavour to the combat and are each lethal in their own way. Alongside those weapons you have a leash on your arm with which you can drag enemies over to you in a Scorpion-esque fashion and a kick which would put Chuck Norris to shame. On top of that, every weapon has a “charge” function which brings even more destruction to the table. For example the pistol can take a man’s head clean off, but the charge function will turn it into a flare gun which you can fire into a charging enemy and watch as he spirals into his friends and turns them all into burning, screaming bags of points.

Ah yes, points, they’re what the game comes down to. In Bulletstorm simply killing everything in front of you to complete the mission isn’t enough. As the caption says, you have to do it with skill. All your kills have points attached to them; a simple kill will net you a measly ten points, but wrap and enemy in a chain bomb and kick him into a group of enemies who happen to be standing next to a bomb and watch your points soar. Each kill has its own “skillshot” attached to it and with 135 skillshots in the game you’ll have a hard time repeating kills over and over again. The game has a list of every skillshot and how to get them, but the fun is in experimenting yourself, I have tried 75% of the skillshots in game and I’ve probably looked up on five of them. Bulletstorm goes out of its way to pat you on the head for your killing and the moments where you truly pull off something fantastic and watch all the numbers fly over head can be quite exhilarating.

While you can have a lot of fun trimming the hoards of Stygia the actual set pieces in the game are lacking. Anytime something big came around, the game would invert itself and suddenly Grayson would take control of me. Most of the games set-pieces boil down to you pressing a single button and watching as the action unfolds, in a game that prides itself on making you look cool as you fight, the fact it takes that ability away from you in the most dramatic moments is both galling and extremely frustrating. When someone wants to play a video game, they want to do exactly that, play it. If the player was given full control over those set pieces, what they would lack in visual impressiveness they would vastly make up in excitement and immersion. Simply pressing “x” does not kill the most basic of enemies so it should not kill the biggest and baddest Bulletstorm has to offer.

A lot has been made of the humour in Bulletstorm and for the most part it is a funny game. It is crude and tickles the lowest part of your funny bone, but it’s in tone with the whole over the top nature of the game so it works. What doesn’t work quite so well is when the story tries to put the ridiculousness of the game on pause and gets serious. It’s hard to get into the moment when Grayson gets philosophical with his old ex-soldier buddy Ishi, since not two minutes ago he was shouting “Eat this dick-tits” as he threw an enemy strapped with explosives into another group of enemies to attain the skillshot “Gang-bang”. For the most part the story fits well and provides a few chuckles, but these moments of seriousness (more frequent towards the end) jerks you out of your point-gaining fervour and feels very much out of place.

Fun is a word we’ve probably lost sight of while reviewing games, but it is brought into the fore in Bulletstorm. Killing enemies is fun, listening to the crude jokes is fun, the guns are fun and gaining new skillshots is fun. Bulletstorm isn’t a game that attempts to further the genre in any way; it’s not a game we’ll all look back on as something that changed the nature of the FPS. But for all the fantastic narrative devices in the Half-life series or the exploration in the Stalker series none of those games achieve the same amount of pure joy you get from the combat in Bulletstorm.