Posts Tagged ‘mafia 2’

Editing & Pacing in Video Games

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

I suspect it’s very easy for people to get confused at the idea of editing video games. After all, there isn’t really much by way of traditional “edit-points”. Outside of cut-scenes, you don’t usually switch angles, and when you do (primarily done in third-person survival horror games) it’s usually for practical reasons. There are exceptions – you cut to a a closer angle when Edward Carnby approaches the entrance to the tomb in Alone in the Dark so you can better see what he’s doing, sure, but it might also be an angle chosen to emphasise the claustrophobia of the environment. Or, perhaps, to strategically hide the mummy coming up behind Edward to play up the ‘boo!’ factor when we cut to a wide shot again.

Playing angles for cheap scares in Alone in the Dark 2.

What triggers these angle-changes, however, is the player. Maybe it’s moving toward the edge of the screen that triggers it. Or, maybe, hitting the ‘view’ button in a more typical game. So the idea of the art of editing actually existing within a game – especially a first-person game where your perspective is constant and entirely player-controlled – doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But really, when you consider that the pace of a game is so heavily controlled by the player in a video game, it makes the managing of pace not just more difficult – but much, much more important. Let’s take a look at the most common way of dealing with pace…

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Possession and Acquisition

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Note: Despite discussing it heavily, this article does not contain spoilers for Mafia 2.

Ownership can be one of the biggest draw cards for a game, and not just in video games. Take Monopoly, for instance. Created in the early years of the 20th century, it first found popularity during the great depression; when people could barely afford dinner and a roof over their heads, fantasies of wealth sell better than ever.

Even genres such as computer role-playing games are more about acquisition than actual role-playing – something as ‘simple’ as a graphical rogue-like such as Diablo can drive players into hours of gaming ‘over-time’ just to acquire a complete set of mythril armour.

For this reason, sandbox video games and many a title focused on organised-crime, whether serious or comedic, often have a mechanic for the acquisition of ‘things’ – from safe-houses, weapons and vehicles to businesses & other properties. This has varied wildly from game to game, and rarely has a particularly large impact on the over-all story.

Which brings me to Mafia 2.

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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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