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.

A Few Thoughts On: Magicka

When I heard of Magicka my first thought was one of dismissal, I didn’t really need another Diablo clone so close to the actual Diablo III release date, especially when I have a barely touched Torchlight sitting in my Steam account. My second thought was to maybe read up a little about it before I passed judgement, and thankfully I did. Magicka is a top down “Magic ‘em Up” developed by Arrowhead Studios, a small time Swedish company. In Magicka you’re given eight spells from eight different elements, and with these spells you have five slots in which to combine them. So for instance, while channelling fire five times nets me a relatively weak fire spray, substituting two of those slots for say earth gives me a nice powerful fireball. This is just the tip of the iceberg and the amount of combinations you have at your disposal are mouth-watering. 

 

The first thing that struck me about the game was its humour. Comedy and love are two elements that I’ve always felt games have struggled with. But when a game can successfully deliver comedy, it, as a whole will flourish from it. Portal while technically excellent wouldn’t have been half the game if GLaDOS was simply “The Bad Guy.” From cult references to the excellent “Vlad” (not a vampire), Magicka has humour in abundance and while you may curse quite a lot, you’ll also laugh.

It’s quite a long game too for the price of ten Euros. It took me about ten and a half hours to complete the single-player and there is also the multi-player and various challenges to try. You’re given the eight spells right at the start of the game and without changing anything but your staff and sword those spells are to last you eleven hours and beyond. You do find spell books along the way, unlocking new combinations for special spells such as Thunderstorm and Teleport, but since all of your spells are unlocked at the beginning there is the worry of boredom setting in as you fall into a routine. To be quite honest I did sort of settle into a routine, I had one combination which saw me through most of my killing but not all of it. Arrow-head studios were clearly aware of this problem and threw teleporting dwarves, Ogres with hand-held mortars and other sorts of mythical beasts at me to rock me out of my routine, and it worked! There is no one spell that will see you through every fight and learning what works well in what situation is one of the fundamental joys of Magicka.  I’m struggling to remember the last game where I could visibly see myself getting better that didn’t use a levelling system.

But for all its ‘sploady fun Magicka does have its downsides. I still have to get a multiplayer game working properly, which is a shame because from what I’ve seen the game looks like it’ll become even better playing with friends. The single-player has its issues also, the inability to save in between levels and the widely spread checkpoints are the source of much frustration. While I criticised Bioshock for having its respawning system I think Magicka has gone past hard and into frustrating at times. I’m a firm believer that while a game like this shouldn’t be easy, it also shouldn’t have you cursing in frustration as a boulder randomly blasts you into lava setting you back another 10 minutes of progress.

That said, Magicka is a breath of fresh air. As I mentioned before, when I looked at Magicka I immediately thought “Diablo clone” which just shows what sort of mind-frame all these rehashes have put me in. But no, Magicka is genuinely innovative and above all just a lot of fun. Arrowhead studios looked at what Diablo had done and instead of copying it like everyone else, they created their own take on it and subsequently gave us a fantastic combat system we’ve never seen before and I’m genuinely delighted they’re getting success with this title.

MMOs and the WoW model.

When someone mentions the Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMO) genre, grinding quests and enemies to level up, gaining new items through killing bosses in dungeons and repeatedly killing eachother in PvP will usually spring to mind. MMOs now have defined gameplay mechanics. But, back when the first MMOs were released these mechanics we all take for granted now weren’t there. Since there was no mould, MMOs at that time took all shapes and sizes. Games like Ultima online, The Legend of Mir and Lineage all had mechanics that we don’t see today. The Legend of Mir had guild run territories, Lineage had player driven politics and Ultima online famously had its non-combatant classes. All three games were also brutally hard on the newer player with open world PvP and free for all looting. These are all aspects that are looked back on with fond nostalgia for many gamers who regard the modern MMO as a disappointment. However it’s important to note that these games weren’t perfect, they were hugely complex, extremely rough around the edges and most importantly focused on grinding experience.

In 1999 a game called EverQuest was released and its mechanics would shape the future of MMOs. Bringing in a 3D world and focusing on group centric experience gaining, it was a massive hit. EverQuest had begun the mould which would lead on to define MMOs as we now know them. The trend in MMOs to accept a dominant mould and follow in it began here, games like Dark Age of Camelot, Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Ragnarok Online and Star Wars Galaxies all based their mechanics off EverQuest. However this mould wasn’t perfect, it still hadn’t tackled the problem of the boring grind for experience, and there was little to no endgame. 

In 2003 Eve Online was released, and was a revelation to the MMO genre. Completely disregarding the conventional mechanics set up by EverQuest, it did away with the traditional levelling system and instead let people pursue different areas of the game. To this day it stands apart from the traditional MMOs and flourishes because of it. A year later another MMO was released that went back to the EverQuest model, but instead of tweaking it slightly to create its own niche, World of Warcraft (WoW) decided to take on the model and improve it. The launch of WoW was as unstable as every other MMO (something many of us have forgotten), however its launch was a success thanks to the low specs it required, the fact that it had a fan base off the back of the strategy games, and also the relative failure of EverQuest 2. Due to all these reasons WoW survived the trickiest part of creating an MMO, retaining a player base after the launch. It now went about its ultimate goal of improving on the EverQuest model. 

The main change was focusing on the end game, rather than the levelling that preceded it. Now when you had reached the level cap you had a multitude of bosses with all sorts of different combat mechanics that required group cohesion to defeat them. In essence it took the focus on the group that made EverQuest so popular, but instead of using that group to level, it took it to the endgame. This proved to be a massive success and introduced the idea of competitive PvE’ing where guilds would race eachother to boss kills. Another massive success was lessening the harshness of levelling. Now because the focus was at the level cap, the process of levelling was made easier, with less experience grinding, a wide spread quest based system and a focus on solo levelling. Mechanics such as losing experience points on death, or massively long corpse runs were also cut in favour of a more casual experience. All this made for a much friendlier approach to levelling and it was a roaring success, breaking all sorts of records for subscribers.

All of these changes effectively meant WoW had improved on EverQuests model enough to consider it their own. Over the years WoW has polished this model to a mirror shine, and it now is pretty much a perfect model for MMO games. Unlike EverQuest it is so polished and perfect that now when other companies try and make their own games off the model by tweaking it slightly to create a niche, they usually fail because these small changes aren’t enough to drag players away from WoW. What does this mean then? Blizzards titan has gone as far as this model can go and any attempt to follow it will at best only result in a player base just able to turn a profit. It’s time developers changed their thinking on MMOs, the EverQuest/WoW model cannot be improved any more. WoW now has five years of development time added onto it and it’s just not possible for a new MMO to challenge that amount of polish. 

If a company wants to create something to best WoW it has to do it by creating something different. The heavy focus on PvP that Warhammer Online had, or the way Bioware will try and use story to enhance The Old Republic are not big enough changes. Developers need to change the core of this model, changes like ripping out the levelling system, or creating a player driven world will attract a player base it just needs to be done well. Some people claim that WoW has taken the MMO as far as it can go, but that’s a narrow way of looking at it, they have taken a model that the MMO has subscribed to for a long time as far as it can go, but the genre itself has many possibilities.

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".