Posts Tagged ‘immersion’

Breaking Immersion with DLCs

Friday, August 27th, 2010

I’ve been waiting a long time for Mafia II. 2920 days, in fact. Since I first saw the truly extraordinary opening video for the original Mafia. Hell, I didn’t even need to have played the game before I was excited about whatever they might do with a sequel. Once I’d actually played the game, I went from excited about a sequel to frustrated that I couldn’t play it immediately.

Being a huge fan of the era (and the genre) I was, naturally, pretty quick to pre-order the uber-awesome feature-packed special edition, complete with A2 posters of ’50s pin-up girls and even some bonus DLC.

Flash forward to the 26th of August, and I’m at home and slowly, methodically punching in the DLC codes into my xbox before booting up the game for the first time.

Now, you need to understand something about me. My fixation with the ’30s through to the ’50s is pretty full-on. I’m one of those people who’s read most James Ellroy novels more than once, and who even tolerated ‘Mobsters’ and ‘Mulholland Falls’ despite them having almost no redeeming features as films.

This being the case, when I boot up a game like Mafia, I try to get as involved as humanly possible in the story. I don’t run around like an unruly hoodlum – I try to behave in-character as much as I can. This means a that, in a story like Mafia, I try to consider the situation the main character is in and let it guide my decisions.

Vito, the protagonist of Mafia II, quickly finds himself sleeping on his friend Joe’s couch, doing wet-work for the mob while wearing a grotty leather jacket and driving a stolen car whose plates have been changed. This seems to sum up the tone of the early game pretty well – a game that spans a decade. As the game progresses from the part of the story in the ’40s to the ’50s component, the world changes appropriately. The music, cars and the look and feel of the city shifts.

But at the beginning, you’re stuck with whatever clothes you can buy in the city of Empire Bay during the final months of World War 2 – an era defined by shortage, food & fuel rationing, et cetera.

So when I realised what the DLC had done, I was quite perplexed. Let me explain – by unlocking these pre-order DLCs, I had brought four new ’50s sports cars and some mob/vegas style outfits into the game. Cool, no?

Definitely cool. Some additional kit to make Vito look like a really successful mafioso, and some swanky new sports cars to make getting away from the cops just that much easier. The only problem is that, being bonus DLC, the content is promptly made available to you from the beginning of the game.

While the game’s story is guiding you through stealing your first car and shopping for ’40s-style clothing throughout the shops of Empire Bay, sitting in the players’ garage are four anachronistic sports cars and in his wardrobe, four outfits that there’s no way a man who’s having trouble coming up with the cash to rent his own place would be able to afford.

I dread to think how much easier the early car chases of the game would be if you drove these ’50s-styled beasts around instead of the ’30s and ’40s clunkers that dominate the roads in this chapter of the game.

Now, I’m fully aware that this is really quite a silly thing to nitpick about – but in a game where immersion in the game world is key to keeping your audience, and where such attention to detail has been paid in every aspect of the game’s visual development, it seems a bit unfortunate to throw in bonus stuff that breaks this.

Me, personally? I’d have been happy if I at least had to spend in-game cash to get the content I’ve unlocked… though I realise that I’m probably alone in this regard, and it would most likely have been a rather bad business decision had they done this.

What do you think? Have you ever obtained DLC of any kind (not third-party mods, but first-party content) that has changed the game for the worse for you? What about the actual gameplay? I suspect these fast cars will give players with this DLC an advantage in the early-game, although it’s just a theory so far. Have you ever obtained DLC that altered the difficulty of the game itself?

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Tap X to Destroy Immersion

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

In the first episode of our podcast, Jeremy, Joab Gilroy and myself discussed the nature of games as a unique medium. During this discussion, the game Heavy Rain, and it’s predecessor, Fahrenheit were mentioned.

These are fairly unique games, for two reasons:

Firstly, they have truly adaptive plot structures – precisely the thing that makes people like Roger Ebert state that makes video games incapable of qualifying as ‘art’. (A subject for another article) This should make me hugely happy to play it (and doubtlessly, also play the second one) over and over.

And yet I haven’t, and after playing the demo of Heavy Rain, suspect I probably won’t for that, either. Why? For this, second reason:

Despite their brilliant use of the medium’s ability to adapt its narrative based on the player’s actions, the actual ‘gameplay’ alternates between extremely simple gestures and a frustrating Alone in the Dark-esque movement system… and quicktime events.

I played the demo with my partner sitting on the couch beside me, sipping some wine. The lights were off, the sound was up, and appropriately enough, there was a torrential downpour outside. Add a large, expensive HDTV and you have pretty much the perfect environment to get truly immersed in anything – video game or film.

Now, There is a sequence in the Heavy Rain demo that has the player character involved in a spectacularly well-choreographed fight sequence. Two men are hurling objects, crashing through things and desperately trying anything to subdue their opponent.

Once it began, the quicktime events came on-screen in earnest. Tap Circle. Tape Square. Make the following gesture with your right-stick. Now hit triangle.

After an epic struggle with my controller, the fight was over – my character victorious.

“Wow,” was the comment from my partner.

But from me? Well, don’t ask me what just happened – I was paying too much attention to the little Playstation symbols appearing on-screen to actually appreciate the visuals, the choreography, or the intensity of the scene in general.

Which is where these games fall down.

In almost another action game, be it Modern Warfare 2, Grand Theft Auto IV or Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball, you learn the controls quickly and then are simply able to play the game – all the while absorbing the visuals and the world that the designers have created.

You are controlling the world using a system which, after a while, becomes intuitive. It is second nature to duck behind cover, enter a vehicle, or perform a high pass with the ball. The gameplay adds to the immersion.

But with these games – Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain – even ignoring for a moment that the “gameplay” is a largely arbitrary collection of button-presses and gestures – you are forced to look out for the little symbols that keep floating frustratingly and obtrusively on-screen. You cannot simply learn the interface and ‘play’. Instead of adding to your immersion into the world, the gameplay helps destroy and detach you from the experience that these games might otherwise be able to provide you.

As a result, it becomes difficult to fully appreciate the impressive amount of effort that’s got into everything else in the game – from the animations & characterisations to the background detail of each scene.

These are fascinating games. Spectacular exercises in just what gaming might become in the future – truly interactive stories, not just rollercoaster rides where they give you a fake steering wheel to make you think you’re in control.

But as long as they are pinned down by “gameplay” that’s actually less complex (and much less intuitive) than Space Invaders, they will simply be exercises – curiosities.

I’m sure I’ll play the game once it’s released, and if I can get past the “gameplay” I might even enjoy it enough to finish it – maybe even more than once. But I’ll tell you one thing about Heavy Rain: it’s the first time in gaming history that I’ve actually wished my girlfriend was the gamer, and that I could be the spectator – one sitting on the couch with a glass of wine actually enjoying the game.

Because around half the entire length of the game I sure as fuck won’t be.

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