A few days ago, I read through Elan Ruskin’s excellent 2012 GDC presentation on how Valve handled character dialogue in Left4Dead and I felt like I understood about two thirds of it, which is pretty good. (I read it instead of watching it because GDC doesn’t seem to have any videos on YouTube from that long ago, nor do they seem to upload videos that get this explicitly technical, but Ruskin put his slides and script online, which is a very awesome thing to do.) Left4Dead’s dialogue system is a marvel and it’s my opinion that anyone interested in making character-driven games should make themselves familiar with how it works.
(Because Left4Dead and Left4Dead2 are basically the same game, I’ll be mostly referring to them as if they were just one title.)
In particular, I’ve been interested in how systems like this could apply to JRPGs, which are my main area of interest but have been developmentally stagnant since at least the PlayStation 1 era. Other genres have thoroughly pilfered what were once considered to be RPG mechanics—variable statistics, unlockable abilities and so on—but RPGs haven’t done the same in return, and its most critical flaw, the strict segregation of storytelling and gameplay, going almost entirely unaddressed. For a genre that sells itself on the strength of its writing, it’s not a great thing for plot and character development to come to a halt the moment a player starts navigating a dungeon or fighting trash mobs.
To get the review portion out of the way: Heat Signature is a really, really god damn good game from Suspicious Developments (who previously made the also really good Gunpoint). It’s basically Hotline Miami restructured as a mission based roguelike with a randomized unlock tree. If that sounds like a solid game idea, it is, and the game does it extremely well. It’s less than a month old and it’s 15 bucks.
Nothing is perfect though, and having just completed a 20 hour run of the game (which slaughtered most of my free time during the last week and a half), I have some thoughts on the parts that could have used a bit more attention.
Some pretty big end game spoilers are at the end of this post.
(I wrote this a few days ago when the site was offline so it’s going up now.)
Having just watched what was probably the conclusion of A Raving Loon’s stream series of Xenogears—which ended very badly—I’ve been reflecting on how a game that was genuinely my favorite Playstation 1 game at the time is now just so…bad. What ultimately killed the stream series was the infamous train wreck that was disc 2, where the game essentially retires from being a game and becomes hours of characters sitting in a chair in front of a still image in otherwise empty space, talking about all the amazing things that would have happened if there had actually been a game here. The longstanding problem of the game’s verbosity stretches beyond a breaking point and the person formerly known as the player drowns in information dumps of trivia and references to a garbled understanding Kabbalistic and Gnostic mysticism, punctuated with the (in retrospect totally busted) pop science of multiple personalities that was popular in 1997. There are a few dungeons and other spots of gameplay thrown in, but they only highlight how awful the rest of the time is. After 10 or 12 (or more) hours of this, you’re eventually dumped back into a world map that has probably five interesting locations on it, one of which is the final dungeon.
What’s strange is that none of this bothered me at the time. The awfulness of disc 2 was generally regarded as being a tragic result of insufficient time and/or money, rather than being an unmitigated title destroying disaster. In an era where AAA games are routinely released in an incomplete state with the rest of the content (and most QA work) being developed after the fact, possibly as DLC, the way Xenogears handled its second half would render the game unsellable today and probably damage the reputation of its publisher. The game’s director apparently went on the record recently to say that it was the result of mostly leaving the game to new, inexperienced employees and interns. If that’s true, it only happened because of major negligence on the part of the people who should have been building the game. More to the point, I have trouble believing it. The fact that most of the team eventually left Square to form their own company in order to make Xenosaga, the game they apparently wish they could have made, suggests a passion for the project that would make it extremely unlikely that they’d have left it in the hands of others.
Xenosaga was itself a production disaster: It was intended to be six games, each representing one of the six episodes Xenogears promised in its ending, but the first game was itself so incomplete that it represented only the first third of the story they wanted to tell. It ultimately took them three whole games to accomplish what they’d planned to do in one, and the series was then terminated due to poor sales, in no small part due to the fact that, yes, in this case you actually do have to play the first two games to understand the third. What all of this tells me is that the team behind Xenogears and Xenosaga have terrible project management skills. If they’d had the time and money that its fans in 1997 wished they’d had, they’d have made a game that was twice as big and still only 50% complete. The explanation that they’d left the game to interns either speaks to that managerial incompetence, or is just a petty attempt to shift blame to others.
That said, the game itself has much to recommend it (even though I wouldn’t): it has an amazing if too short soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda, excellent sprite work, a few extremely good mech designs, and a number of enthralling subplots that could have easily carried their own games. Despite everything I’ve said, it really is tragic that the game ended up in its sorry state. What the game desperately needed wasn’t time and money, it was an editor that had the authority to cut out the unnecessary exposition, plot arcs that don’t go anywhere and all the mythology that just doesn’t need to be communicated. Call it Donnie Darko syndrome.
“Hear me out,” the boy continued. “I am not yet a warrior, so my sword will not be needed. I cannot read the portents, so the people will not seek my counsel. And I am young, and not yet wise in the ways of the law. I will retrieve the Gifts of the All-Maker from the Greedy Man. If I cannot, I will not be missed.”
The Skaal thought on this briefly, and decided to let Aevar go.
I’m apparently spending a lot of time wondering about the psychology of terrible people.
I am late to this and only catching up but the misogynistic storm raging in the gaming world about indie game dev Zoe Quinn is insane and terrifying. It’s not the first time this has happened and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s always depressing to remember that something you love so much can have such a disgusting and toxic culture.
But why the hell is gaming so uniquely ugly in this regard? The world of entertainment is a misogynistic place. In competitive fields where individuals are vying for attention (such as film or electronic music), women are generally paid much less or consistently overlooked. It’s quiet, effective and nasty. Video games, apparently, are a different bag of oranges. Why can’t they just quietly drown women’s dreams like everyone else? Why does it have to be so incredibly explosive and violent?
I have a guess, and it ties into what is basically the unraveling of traditional nerd culture.
I found the above video in a thread commenting on STAR_’s foray into Team Fortress Classic (and Bananaland). They at least had the perspective to acknowledge that the video was funny and giving attention to the game, even if highlighted some of its worst aspects (Bananaland). But there was still a lot of the grumbling.
The reasons given for the death of this style of movement are generally that first person shooters took a big shift towards gritty realism, especially as they moved to the console (true), and that Gabe Newell of Valve hated bunnyhopping and regarded it as a bug to be fixed (also true). But the second reason is more a symptom than a cause, and the first is an oversimplification of a larger trend, which is that showing up to an FPS in the days of once upon a time fucking sucked.
