Of gaming convention and Prototype.

Prototype frustrates me. It frustrates me as someone who designs games and it frustrates me as someone who plays games.

As many regular readers of this corner of the intertwat will be fully aware, I’m a passionate advocate of not just looking to the past for our games but looking to the future too. There’s many a thing that can annoy me along the way. I’ll gleefully admit I get annoyed quite easily when I hit upon idiotic design decisions, but there’s little that frustrates and annoys me more than doing wot games do without asking the question “yeah, but should I do that?”.

Prototype is a fine example of something that could be utterly, utterly wonderful if only someone had stopped and asked that question then acted upon the results. Now, I understand this isn’t always possible in mainstream game design and as an Indie I get a luxury afforded to me that many don’t. I can do what I want. I can strip out huge chunks of a game if I choose. In a market that demands bigger, better, harder, faster, longer, more it’s not always something that is seen as an acceptable choice, perhaps by the designers, perhaps by the money men, perhaps by the idiotic vocal twats on forums and comments sections who don’t know what they really want but will shout anyway if it means they might perhaps get their way. And sometimes by perfectly level headed folk too.

Essentially, I know that the choices that are easy for me to make don’t necessarily apply to mainstream games. Unfortunately, I also inhabit my own head which is often filled with “yeah, but, yeah, but, wouldn’t it be nice…” thoughts. It’s a flaw that comes with wanting games to be all they can be and to achieve all they can. I’m not sorry about that but if it makes any passing reader feel a bit better I’ll consider an apology all the same.

Y’see, Prototype should be awesome. For five minutes at the start, it shows you just how awesome it can be. Those five minutes are some of the most insane grin-like-a-twat-and-laugh-like-a-loon minutes I’ve had the pleasure of playing. For five minutes flat, you bound down the street leaping over cars, kicking helicopters out of the air, punching tanks, throwing cars around. It gives you the powers to be the ultimate superhero and happily lets you play. It’s madness, it’s carnage, it’s obscenely stupid. It’s fucking fun.

Then it takes it all away. *thud* Back down to Earth with a motherfucking bang. Enjoy those 5 minutes of playing SuperGod? Now you’ve got to work to get that feeling back. That’s a really horrid thing to do, y’know? You wouldn’t give a child a new toy and take it off him after 5 minutes and tell him he can have it back after he’s tidied his room, it’d make you a cunt. You’d give it to him after he’d earned it, surely? Or if you’re an especially nice person – give it the kid anyway and let him play because he’s not doing any harm. For some reason, Prototype thinks taking the toys away after waving them in your face is a perfectly fine thing to do. I say it’s the actions of a cunt.

Not only that, but it sends the player one message loud and clear. The game says “I’m going to make you work for your entertainment”.

That feels wrong to me.

Now, I’m not in the militant camp that proclaims games should be fun full stoppy because that’s insane talk from mental cases. I am, however, in the camp that says games that set out to be fun should be fun without placing needless barriers between the player and that fun. Prototype has, tucked inside it, all the elements that it’d take to make a massively fun game. Occasionally, it teases you with them just like in those initial moments. Often it chooses to work against you having that fun. It’s counterproductive game design because y’know, it actually makes the game fucking worse.

Aside from the initial five minutes, you have cut scenes telling a story that even the most bored gamer would find it difficult to bear, you have the obligatory leveling up mechanism (one of my absolute bugbears is the “ability to buy upgrades automagically makes something better” school of game design), you have fetch quests, you have escort quests, you have “go to the other side of the city to pad out the game for another 5 minutes” quests, you have stupid fucking difficulty spikes where their only visible purpose appears to be to elongate the game further and you have the biggest crime of them all. Every button on the controller syndrome.

And why? Because these are the things that wot games do. Prototype does that wot games do. Here’s a brilliant game that’s had the life kicked out of it by convention.

I’d hoped that by now we’d be seeing a lot less of adding stuff because we can and because games do that sort of thing and because it’s what’s expected. I’d hoped that we’d be seeing more in the way of stuff that’s done because the game design demands it or it actively makes the gamer better. It’s not like we haven’t got enough material to refer back to and see what might and might not work is it? Oh wait, yes we do, 30 bloody years of it. We should fucking know by now that there’s no need to pad shit out like this.

As someone who designs games I get frustrated because I know that leaving stuff out because it adds nothing of value is a worthy pursuit and as a player I plain and simple don’t want to sit through a load of shit to get to the good bits.

Can we make a pact right now to just quit this shit, please? I promise we’ll end up with better games if we do.