I’ve been playing Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance lately. Silly name aside (get it, KH:DDD or KH:3D ’cause it’s on the Nintendo 3DS? Hur hur), it’s a pretty sweet game, building on Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2, weaving in the other tangential Kingdom Hearts games that have been released. They are finally moving the Sora narrative forward instead of navel-gazing and weaving backstories. It’s technically excellent, with fantastic visuals that rival the original (on the Playstation 2) and some decent use of the 3DS 3D feature. It’s not necessary to play it in 3D (games that require the 3D would bug me), but the effect is great for some of the storytelling bits, setting the scene nicely.
So, KH nerdfanning aside (I do love the games), what strikes me most is the sheer fun of moving around in the game. The KH games have always been “action RPGs”, but this newest iteration has the characters zooming around the landscape, performing impossible air dashes, jumps and attacks that are just… fun. I’ve had similar fun just moving around in the Prince of Persia games. KH:3D lacks some of the elegance of the ‘Prince and the fluid athleticism of almost-plausible Parkour, but it makes up for it in speed and flexibility. I can use Sora and Riku’s “Flowmotion” abilities to ping-pong around a level or even scale a huge cliff in a few crazy jumps.
Here, I can admit that I’d probably love the Assassin’s Creed games, and their focus on Parkourish motion and exploring rooftops. They are M-rated, though, and I just don’t play M-rated games. It’s a personal choice that does cut me off from some games I suspect I’d really like, like the AC games, Mass Effect, The Secret World and BioShock, but that’s just one of my lines in the sand. It’s not a commentary on the potentially great games they are, just that there are some things I don’t want in my entertainment. Too much “coffee in the brownies”, as it were. That’s also not to denigrate any players who like those games or those developers who make them. I’m just a picky consumer.
Anyway, with the fun of Flowmotion rattling around in my head, I look at this Guild Wars 2 thing, with its respect for the Explorer mindset that I’m so deeply infused with, and, well… I kinda wish more MMOs would experiment with Parkour and new ways of getting around their game spaces. Yes, I hear TERA has some sort of climbing system, but that’s rudimentary compared to what I’m thinking about. I look at the ruins of Ascalon and think “I’d love to just climb around and go all monkeyish on it (Charrish, whatever)”. And yes, I love flying in MMOs, but climbing around like a superagile simean Spider-man is just… different. I hear City of Heroes has some pretty great movement options, too… maybe I should check those out before the game is shuttered forever.
So yes, I look at places in games and think “how can I get there?” I love Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City for the same reason; I can just go explore and climb around the place. I wish we had more of that sort of flexibility, especially in the MMO space. Developers are making these beautiful worlds… I want to go explore them.
Personally I love the Kingdom Hearts series, but couldn’t continue as they kept putting games on different systems… (I wish they would bring them all out for PC or have a “collection” with all of them for one system, like the 360 or something).
I never played CoH, but I know Champions Online, you can have travel powers that basically have you jumping and flipping from building to building.
If you really like that whole parkour thing, though, you should check out the game Mirror’s Edge. It’s a FPS style (rated T, by the way), but is literally all about that. :)
Ah, I knew I was forgetting something! Mirrors’ Edge is pretty sweet. I still haven’t gotten far in it, but yes, it’s a great Parkour-inspired game. Thanks for the reminder!
I hear you on the system hopping nature of the KH series. It’s my biggest complaint with it. I’m borrowing the 3DS from my brother just to play KH:3D, and I bought a PSP (used) largely to play Birth By Sleep and a handful of tactical games. I’d be very happy with a collection on the PC. They would even get double sales from me that way. Win-win!
I’m wary of trusting game age ratings. There’s too many assumptions that games are “only for kids”. I just played through Bioshock, and I’d be surprised if it had gotten a PG-13 rating, let alone an R, if it had been a movie.
I’ve never heard the phrase “coffee in the brownies”. What’s that mean? A google search turned up nothing, so I assume it’s a local saying.
The reason why you usually don’t have movement puzzles in MMOs is because of teleport hacks. Unless you have the server verify every movement (which can lead to lag), it’s hard to verify that someone actually did the jumping puzzle rather than just teleporting to the final position.
It’s not that I trust the M-rating in itself, or movie ratings, for that matter, it’s that every M-rated game I’ve looked into with some interest just has enough gore, sexuality or profanity to push it out of my comfort zone. I’m sure that there are games, like movies, that are on the soft side of the rating and others that earn it fair and square. Even so, what we might think of as a “high PG-13″ can often be beyond my taste. It’s largely subjective, yes, but it’s my experience that I find enough to dislike around the possibly fuzzy border between T and M that I feel no compelling reason to step over it in the hopes that the game was judged too harshly.
I’m actually all for truly mature themes, treated with respect. I just think that too many games are “Mature”, which all too often is really immature obsession with boob physics, shocking gore, near-constant profanity and the like. I believe it is possible to discuss most mature subjects without being offensive, but the word “mature” has been so warped in the game industry that it’s almost useless.
Even looking at something like Mass Effect… I’ve done a fair bit of reading on it, plenty of it spoiler heavy. I consider many of the choices that Shepard has to make to be interesting moral dilemmas, but they get mixed in with the “let’s have sex with aliens after going on a headshot spree” *gaming* trappings. For every hard discussion about whether or not genocide might be understandable, or who to trust and why, there are ghoulish technozombies or bloody bugs going for the shock angle. There’s good, interesting stuff there. There just happens to be other stuff that I don’t want to wade through to get to the stuff I like.
Similarly, I detest horror movies, as I’ve written before, but I find value in telling stories that might be chilling or horrible in their implication. Some sicko serial murderer picking off stupid teens isn’t nearly as interesting as a peek into the mind of a person losing their memories to dementia, trying desperately to hold on to important thoughts even as the perception of reality slips away. The latter may well be truly horrifying, thinking about losing the things you value most, but it can be told with sufficient maturity and restraint that it need not venture into the dark, evil fringe of storytelling.
On another tack, there is much to be realized about the horror of war or terrorism (say, 9/11) without perusing a series of photographs of the body parts of victims. There’s value in truth and documenting things that are truly horrible and awful, but there’s sense in not making those horrible aspects of life or entertainment the point of seeking truth or entertainment.
“Coffee in the brownies” is just a phrase I coined, vaguely referencing my “Fudge ratings” article from a while back. It’s just shorthand to note that some people like coffee, some people like chocolate, some like them mixed. I can’t stand coffee, but I love chocolate, and any amount of coffee in my desserts will ruin them for me, though others may love them and/or have different tolerances. I could have written “onions in the sandwich” to communicate much the same thing, since I loathe onions but am rather fond of sandwiches. A crunchy, nasty onion sneaking into my sandwich will put me off of eating the whole thing. Others won’t eat sandwiches *without* onions.
Using a food metaphor is a way to note that I’m talking about tastes here, rather than making a big stuffy moral case out of it. There’s morality involved, but it’s *my* morality and how I approach the games. I’m not talking about imposing my values on the industry at large, I’m talking about how my values differ from those the industry values, and why that means I’ve chosen to not partake of the whole of the industry. I don’t begrudge the devs their choices, I simply don’t want to support those choices in what I choose to pay money for in entertainment.
Live and let live, as it were, I’m just opting out of some things.
As for jumping around in game spaces, I’m not really even talking about puzzles, exactly, though there is certainly that potential. (And Guild Wars 2 seems to have jumping puzzles, as I read it.) I’m mostly just thinking about getting to interesting places and looking around. Pure Exploration considerations, really. Achievements or other game incentives are irrelevant to my thinking on this one. I just want to climb on stuff.
Wasn’t trying to change your mind, just warning you that not all M-rated games are the same. I hear you about the onions; I hate them, too, but have learned to to eat around them. One time when I was at a restaurant and got onions in my food when I asked for none. I took them out of the food and spelled “NO ONIONS” and on my plate with the onions. :)
I’ve seen people post about GW2 jumping puzzles. I suspect we’ll see teleport cheats for that; could be that GW2 trusts the client too much, since I haven’t heard reports of rubber-banding common with server-authoritative movement.
Just for completeness’ sake, DCUO also proposes a choice of 3 different movement powers, flight, speed and acrobatics – to a point, both of the latter offer parkourish movement.
About Mass Effect’s choices, I think the interesting aspect of it comes from something BioWare didn’t do in other similar RPGs I played – they wrote their alignment system of paragon / renegade along the trusty old D&D axis of lawful chaotic instead of good v. evil. This allowed them to avoid falling into the caricatures of “good is a boy scout, evil is an obnoxious jerk” seen in so many of their other RPGs. Still, dialogue choices remain mostly limited to branching either left of right on their moral axis, and after a while, this leaves the whole experience a bit, uh, flat.
Interestingly enough, I’ve found the best storytelling in Mass Effect games is found in some of the short sidequests you can complete.
What bugs me most about the romance isn’t that it feels like a cheap “we need to have romance in there” clumsy addition though. It’s that the whole romance, compressed into a series of 5 dialogues of 2-3 minutes each, don’t allow for immersion at all. This wasn’t too apparent in ME1 as in the first playthrough I picked a romance interest that was kinda flirty and attracted to Shepard from the get-go. In ME2, though, there was that one character, Miranda, who was (quite well) depicted as cold, distant and mission-focused during the first three dialogue sessions. Then Shepard helps her out on a private endeavour, and the very next time you talk she’s super-flirty.
There’s a reason for that: the romance path is now on step 4 out of 5. I expect the writers didn’t really see the issue and thought the player would kinda “fill in the blanks” and imagine the missing conversation bits between both where Miranda warms up and becomes less distant The problem for me was that in terms of immersion – those missing pieces just weren’t there and at that point, the whole thing came apart.
Interestingly, I lost that savegame. When I restarted, I decided romance was something this game didn’t need, and skipped it altogether.
And since I’m in a big digression about storytelling rather than ratings, let me rant on for a moment. With a couple of months of hindsight, what stands out most in ME1 and ME2 in regards of that feeling of flatness I described above isn’t what is there, it’s what is missing. There are several parts where a bit more depth would have done wonders. Perhaps the most glaring one is surrounding a difficult choice to make at the end of ME1 between two of your companions. When the outcomes of that choice are discussed later both in ME1 and ME2, the dialogue choices are limited to regret (“it had to be done”) or indifference.
One option that I felt was missing and would have added real depth was remorse.
The thing is, I haven’t yet seen any RPGS where the choices presented are more complex than simply two main branches with some possible middle ground (which BTW gimps your character more often than not). That remains a big untapped opportunity going forward.
Sorry for the digression :)
Brian,
I love the NO ONIONS story. :) And no worries, I’m just trying to articulate my thoughts a bit more. You’re right, there is a spectrum of themes out there, and a Bayonetta isn’t nearly the same thing as Mass Effect.
I do suspect there may be technical issues with the GW2 jumping puzzles. That seems inevitable. DDO has a few, too, and I’ve run afoul of them. Maybe it’s alleviated by making the risk/reward minimal?
Altitis,
Thanks for the digression! You’re right, the actual *choices* in ME look to be pretty binary and lacking in nuance (remorse would be great). Maybe it’s just the themes that I appreciate, being a child of Star Trek/Wars/Gate. That middle ground of choice making would be nice to see more in games, especially if it didn’t gimp your character.
…and yes, the “romance by the numbers” just doesn’t work. :(
I did fire up a DCUO character with flight a while back, and while it was fun just zooming around, the game itself didn’t really hook me. It’s not bad, it’s just sorta… there. I do keep meaning to try out the Acrobatics and Speed options, though.
[…] I come down firmly on the intrinsic side. I love Minecraft because it lets me just go do stuff (especially in Creative mode where I can fly and have access to everything). I love Burnout Paradise because I can just go drive around and see what the city holds. I love SSX 3 because you can start at the top of the mountain and just snowboard down to the base, purely exploring the terrain. I love flying in World of Warcraft. I love just moving around in game spaces. […]