Dear Esther
So Dear Esther was released. And I played it. And it was good.
As someone who loved the original mod, it was I suppose expected that some things didn’t hit me as hard as they did then. Because except for the redesigned caves, I knew basically what was up ahead at all times, in some cases I knew which topics the “narrator” (for lack of a better word) would be getting to soon, and I knew how it all ended. That kind of prior experience is going to at least partially dull the emotional impact of pretty much any work, and this was no exception. So after wandering through the first chapter being amazingly impressed but not entirely engaged, it was actually something of a surprise was when things slid into place and the game gripped me as it had done the first time.
It was a sleeping bag that did it. After a slow climb away from a small bay and the wreckage of a container ship, I came to a little two-room bothy on top of the hill. Flashlight turns on as I peer inside; on the table is a pile of books, a few cans and other bits of junk around the floor. Stepping into the next room, I turn to my right and see the sleeping bag laid out, either on the floor or on a small raised bed. There may also have been a suitcase or clothes in the room, I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. Because the thought in my head was now “yes, you could actually camp here - this could be a real place and I could stop here for the night, and really, stay as long as I wanted”. It wasn’t even the first sign of human life on the island - I started at a lighthouse, I’d found empty paint cans, lines drawn in the sand of the beach, books laid by standing stones, markings on cave walls. But the sleeping bag was a sign of inhabitation, and part of me took it as an invitation to see this world as inhabitable.
So - and I find this quite fascinating - I found myself quickly looking up at the ceiling of this virtual dwelling, checking for leaks in case of rain. I stepped back out into the doorway and looked over the surrounding area. In some small corner of my mind, I noted that you might not be able to secure the outer doors, but would probably be able to stay fairly warm inside regardless; and also that an outer wall was damaged, but it was on a separate section and that the two main rooms were sound. In short, I made the mental checks that one might really make were they to stumble across an abandoned shack in the wilderness. Why? I don’t know. I wasn’t going to sleep there, obviously, and I certainly wasn’t concerned about getting cold or wet. None of these thoughts, none of this behaviour was relevant to any particular goal presented by the game, and beyond “huh, someone stayed here”, wasn’t relevant to any part of the “story” or whatever it is that Dear Esther presents on that front. And yet this was me, acting in the world on my own impulses, impulses that were triggered by some culmination of all the game had delivered up to that point - the experience of walking, alone, across some cold, windswept Hebridean island.
A player acting in the game world based on feedback received from the the game could generally be called gameplay. As much as I dislike that word for the mechanical focus it usually implies, I nonetheless feel it’s important to stress that while Dear Esther is absolutely an experiment in stripping back first-person gameplay to a minimum, gameplay still very much exists here. It’s in the simple acts of walking and looking, which are usually taken for granted, but I think this game shows just what powerful tools they can be. Others might see Dear Esther’s experiment as being like stripping back a supporting rope to a few thin strands, but to me it’s more like an orchestra holding their instruments still while a soloist plays. The gameplay here isn’t weaker, it’s just…less noisy.
I stress that because there’s a lot of people out there declaring that this is “not a game”, and I don’t think it’s helpful. I’m less concerned with the people who don’t like the game and are looking for ways to dismiss it - those people exist for every game and generally people aren’t going to listen to them unless they already agree. My concern is more with people who actually do like Esther, or at least respect it, and yet would rather it were not seen as a “real” game, instead being shoved off into some corner like “interactive fiction” where nobody ever has to see it. Some of these people are only trying to help manage the expectations of those who might otherwise go in hoping to see Myst-like puzzles or something, but still, I think it’s bad for gaming as a whole if people start to actively exclude things on the basis that they’re not about killing monsters, solving the mystery, getting the girl, winning and losing.
Games are so often maximalist affairs - fill every corner, explain every detail, occupy every moment. And, you know, that’s fine. But Dear Esther, on the other hand, is an exercise in ambiguity and incompleteness, and I think those ideals, along with all the potential for engaging the player in a more quiet, reflective, internal way, could be of incredible value were more developers to think about making use of them.
And I didn’t even get around to talking about the caves. I don’t really feel like it’s necessary to sit here and pile on praise about the levels being pretty, and the soundtrack wonderful, and the voice acting good etc etc. I did that in my last post about the game after all :) But I kind of want to mention that while the first two chapters have their own kind of beauty (indeed there’s something painterly about the water on those rocky coastlines that I adored), the final two are stunning, especially the caves. It’s not just a pretty level. It’s gut-wrenchingly beautiful, and for me at least, travelling through them was just about a palpable physical experience, one that works so well because you then come out of it. You’ve gone through this untouchable, fantastical real/unreal tunnel, and have been turned back out onto the cold, wet beach. Same as where you left off, but darker. Enlightened? Resigned? Hard to say. Dear Esther plays its cards differently for everyone anyway, but it’s definitely an experience worth having.
The original release of Dear Esther, a Source mod released in 2009, was beautiful. Lead by Dan Pinchbeck of the University of Portsmouth, it was intended as an experiment in paring back “gameplay” to the bare essentials - you move, look, and listen. But it was also a haunting, moving journey through a mind lost in grief, clinging to fading, muddled memories and scrambling for explanation. The only thing that could be said to have let it down was the levels themselves; often quite primitively realised, with not always enough direction, some clipping issues, sound trigger overlaps, the occasional unexpected kill trigger jarring the experience. These were fairly obvious flaws, but everything else was so strong that they became at worst minor quibbles.
Still, they’ll be quibbles no longer. The remake, at the hands of former DICE environment artist Robert Briscoe, has transformed Dear Esther into something that, in places, hardly even looks like it could be possible in Source (those caves!). With Nigel Carrington’s voicework being expanded upon too, and Jessica Curry’s amazing soundtrack being re-recorded, this is really going to be something special.
Mysteries
This scene (and I suppose some threads leading up to it) shows that Bioware have, you know, writers. Mordin feeling regretful, and conflicted about his work was a wonderful moment of quiet reflection. It was genuine, heartfelt, moving and…important. It validated the cinematic approach the game took as being more than just impressive for Transformers-style explosionfests. It’s one of the best scenes in an RPG in recent years.
But every single scene remotely involving this guy:
…is utter nonsense, and seemingly demonstrates that Bioware’s writers are locked up in the back room and forbidden from working on the central “main quest” narrative. Instead, I’m informed, some guy called Bob does those, after he’s cleaned the cafeteria. Who makes these decisions, you ask? Bob does that too.
Please, Bioware. I understand you like Bob, he’s a nice guy, I know. But he’s pretty easily pleased, and I’m sure he’d still be happy if he only got to script a few Volus on a minor space station somewhere. I’m just asking you to switch it around a bit for Mass Effect 3 - give Bob a sidequest or two and bring the writers back out for the main parts - and see how it goes.
Gussing it up, SPUF edition.
Reposted from the Steam forums, re a suggestion proposing the introduction of achievement scoring (ala Xbox Live), possibly even the awarding of free games for getting your score high enough.
The current system lets people see what their friends have actually done. That’s great. If individuals want to invent their own metrics on top of that, whatever, that’s their business. But Steam shouldn’t be involved in promoting the fantasy that an imposed valuation of achievements could be an objective assessment, or could in any way accurately reflect the realities involved in getting them.
Comparing by a score involves making arbitrary decisions about the “worth” of individual achievements. That’s so subjective that the system as a whole cannot end up being anything other than meaningless. And people crave this meaningless comparison? They want to be able to look at the twenty points they have, and say they’re “beating” the fifteen points their friend has, even though those scores were decided on by different developers and required entirely different skill sets to attain? Why? Is competition so important you have to do it even when the competitors aren’t even following the same rules as each other?
I mean it’s not like Steam is short on ways for you to compete with your friends for score, is it? Generally we call those “games”, there are a whole variety of different ones to try.
I have wondered if we’d eventually see requests for another layer - meta-achievements for earning a gamerscore for earning achievements for playing games. But it seems the idea is that after gamerscore, you jump straight into getting actual games. And I know you only put it forward as a possibility, OP, but…wow. People actually want material reward for being entertained? I mean yeah, I’d love that too, if someone gave me free stuff for enjoying myself in my free time that would be fantastic…but it’s a bit mad to seriously ask anyone to do that for you, surely.
It’s just weird, this whole thing. I’m not some achievement-hating traditionalist arguing for the status quo - I think achievements have good uses and are at the very least a cheap way for a developer to add some more goals to keep some people interested. But Gamerscore is a bad idea. It says to people, quite falsely, that vastly different experiences can and should be reasonably reduced to a simple numeric value, and that comparing those values against your friends says…anything at all. It’s utter nonsense, and it shouldn’t be encouraged.
It’s bad enough that so much of the gaming press still insists on hundred-point scoring systems, leaving a whole generation of gamers that seriously think there’s a difference between a 94 game and a 95 game. Fake objectivity and number-worship have done enough damage already, let’s not make it worse.
Easy target of course, this is kind of preaching to the converted on a PC gaming site; and it’s not like there’s any indication Valve intends to implement this kind of thing, so moral outrage is slightly unnecessary. Still, “gamerscore” (and the like) is something I think it’d be a real shame to see spread further than it has.
Games of the Year - Serious Sam 3: BFE
This series of posts is not a “top 3” or “top 10” or whatever, it’s just “games I liked this year”. I’m not sure how many there are yet, I’ve got about a dozen listed but I might come up with more. Anyway, to begin:
If you looked through my screenshots folder you’d be forgiven for thinking Serious Sam 3 is a game about a casual stroll through the desert, rather than one about mowing down hordes of alien invaders. It isn’t that the game is actually empty; rather that I’ve yet to master the skill of reaching over to press F12 while simultaneously dodging a swarm of galloping, razor-clawed skeletons. So I’m just going to link to Devolver Digital CFO Fork Parker’s own trailer and go back to posting mayhem-light shots.
Okay! I kinda covered everything else already - Serious Sam 3 is a game about mowing down hordes of alien invaders. That’s it. So…uhhh…hm.
Alright, well I was a big fan of the earlier Serious Sam games, The First Encounter and The Second Encounter. They gave you, as Sam, an impressive array of weapons, little to no story to bother with (the evil Mental is invading the blah blah blah), and threw you into huge levels that ranged from vast open valleys to cramped dungeons and towers. Inside, you’d cautiously dodge traps and deal with close-range ambushes; outside, you’d contend with entire armies of werebulls, headless kamikazes, giant biomechanoid walkers, and relentless Kleer skeletons.
Serious Sam 3 brings all of that - well, most of that - up to today’s standards. There are a few gameplay additions like a sprint button, but mostly it’s, you know, Serious Same. It’s a sequel in the most mundane way, but also the most impressive way because it would have been so easy to capitulate on many of the things that separate this series from the modern corridor shooter. There’s no cover system, no regenerating health, you can carry all your weapons instead of just two, and the levels - well, the game is still entirely linear, but it’s less a series of shooting galleries and more a series of artillery ranges. The monsters still come thick and fast, and with more destructible environments this time around, prolonged fights can be quite spectacular, as rocket fire from distant enemies reduces the ancient ruins around you to rubble.
The larger battles are truly exhilarating experiences. Although these fights take place on open fields, you’ll quickly learn that simple circle-strafing will get you killed, especially when that next wave of monsters appears and you have to adapt your tactics. It’s hectic, but you learn. You learn each creature’s movement pattern, and you learn to read the audio cues of everything around you at once - the degree to which reading the soundscape is possible (and required) has always been one of the best elements of this series. When you’ve got it all together, it’s not too big a stretch to say there’s something balletic in the crescent arcs carved by your dodging and weaving across the field. Sidestep here, curve back this way, cut forward through the opening in that group, shotgun, shotgun, shotgun. A waltz has less explosions and screaming, generally, but with aliens invading, you take what you can get.
It’s not all like that. I said earlier that Serious Sam 3 brings back most of what the earlier games did well - it does leave a few things behind. The game begins with you getting shot down in a grey, ruined Cairo, and there’s definitely a bit of parody going on as you wander through Middle Eastern streets having orders barked at you over the radio. But whatever the justification, the first two or three levels can be little un-Samlike, with you running through city streets dealing with a few enemies at a time. The second level is particularly boring, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned some people off the game.
The underground sections lack much of the silly charm of previous games, where they were filled with crushing stone pillars, spiked pits and a variety of other dangers. Here, you’re forced to use your flashlight to see, and so far each of these tunnel areas have been very bland, straightforward and slow. In fact a lot of the environments could use an injection of silliness, with too many uneventful secrets, and on the whole not that much visual variety.
Having said that, the game comes with an impressive amount of options - if you feel the game is lacking in colour, for instance, you can go in and turn the saturation way up. If the red blood gets a bit much (and when is starts splashing over your view, it certainly can), you can do as I always have in Serious Sam, and set the game to Hippie Mode, where bloodstains are replaced by floral patterns and chunks of flesh by carrots and pumpkins. If you hate running out of ammo you can play with it set to unlimited. If a friend comes over, you can play splitscreen, which is an option so rare on PC that it should be applauded loudly. Cooperative play has always been a big deal in Serious Sam, and here up to 16 people can play through the campaign at once, which is bound to be a little insane.
I haven’t finished the game yet. I don’t know how nuts the final few levels get. I don’t know if the final boss is fun. I don’t know if there’s enough ammo pickups in truly huge battles, or if the psychic witch-brides become too annoying, or or or or. What I do know is that I’m very, very glad to see Sam back and in such good form.
No no, the other beta. No, the other other one.
There seem to be a lot of big beta tests underway at the moment. The main ones I’ve been focusing on news for are Diablo 3 and Dota 2, but there’s also The Old Republic, there’s Tribes Ascend, and the new Counterstrike is starting one up soon I think. Probably more if I was to actually look.
One that I’ve been following and just got a key for is Path of Exile, a Diablo-style Action-RPG that is, I believe, the first game from New Zealand studio Grinding Gear Games. And it’s something of an ambitious first game - at least, with Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 around the corner, I wouldn’t want to be the guy trying to sell a competitor. So I guess it makes all the more sense that they won’t be selling it, then; instead they’re going free-to-play.
Free-to-play actually suits this genre really well, I think. I’ve been playing some of the ressurected Hellgate this year, which is also now supported by microtransactions, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of possibilities for things to sell on the side without pissing everyone off. The most benign is obviously cosmetics, then there’s things like inventory expanders, experience boosters, character respec tokens, various item customisation thingies…Hellgate actually does get into directly selling power (you can buy up to 10 extra skill points), but in a majority PvE game even that doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. Grinding Gear intend to offer custom leagues, so instead of your character choosing between standard and hardcore or whatever, you can customise your own ruleset for you and your friends. Which is an interesting idea.
Anyway, that’s more an aside. GGG haven’t announced anything much about that side of things, and it’s not why I’m interested in the game. This is why I’m interested in the game:
That’s the passive skill tree. Well, about one-third of it, as much as I could fit on the screen fully zoomed out. It seems clearly influenced by Final Fantasy X’s Sphere Grid, which is fine with me, since I really liked that particular system. The Final Fantasy parallels don’t stop there either. Rather than gain active skills by choosing between pre-set paths on a skill tree as in most games of this genre, Path of Exile doles them out in the form of skill gems - either found as loot or given as quest rewards - that you need to slot into your equipment to access the skill. The gems then gain experience as you do, and so grow in power. On top of that, some gem sockets are linked together, and special support gems can then be used to alter a skill, letting you add, for instance, multiple projectiles, increase area of effect, or a chance to stun. Yes hello, materia. :)
There are to be six classes, of which five are currently in the game, and they differ only in starting stats and their starting position on the passive skill tree. Combined with the skills-as-loot concept, the game sits in a middle ground between class-based and classless gameplay. Class identity is reinforced not by the absence of outside options, but by the fact that it’s generally easier/more efficient to pick up things closer to you - a ranger starts near lots of boosts to bow damage, for instance, whereas if you wanted to boost your energy shield it could take you thirty points just to get there from your side of the grid.
I haven’t played all that far yet, but I’m very interested to see the extent to which this system allows and supports varied and unorthodox character builds, because that’s really one of the things that gives this kind of game lasting appeal. My Templar is using four active skills - a shield charge, a ground slam, an ice nova, and a heavy swing that makes enemies explode into fireballs. And on the passive tree, I’m constantly torn between heading toward more armour, or spell damage, or energy shield, or blocking, or mace accuracy, etc etc. There’s a lot of potential here, though I haven’t yet seen how viable anything is at high levels, and the game does need more active skills just so not everyone of a particular class is kitted out with the same abilities. But the devs are working on that; the game is very much still in active development.
Art’s currently a bit muddy (not helped by the amount of mud depicted in the first act, I guess), music’s in need of variety, animation’s a little clunky, but that stuff can keep getting worked on too, and it isn’t what will make or break this game anyway…or so the optimist in me likes to think. There are a lot of interesting ideas here (two other things I like are the recharging potions, and the lack of any basic “gold” currency - you barter for goods with magic scrolls and a variety of item-transforming orbs). If the developers keep refining what they have, this could be a great addition to what’s looking like a bumper year (or two) for the genre.
Limbo
Okay, so Limbo was good, but I did kind of want to punch the developer in the face for the ending. I mean I don’t want a sappy “find the girl, escape limbo, everything is wonderful” resolution by any means, but geez, it would have worked better for me without that final scene that fades back in after the credits.
I was fine with the abrupt cut-off before that, it left a lot of questions and gave a few subtle hints, which is fantastic because it preserves the dark sense of wonder that the game set up early on. No, I was more than fine with that as the end - I really liked that as the end. But to lead players to ask “What? What happens now?”, and then immediately turn around and answer that question in a very simple way…it feels like a bit of a slap in the face for playing at all, and a bit too forced, like the developer personally reaching in to manipulate you. I get that it’s a grim world and things clearly don’t always work out well for anyone, but…nope, doesn’t work for me.
Other than that, I can definitely see why it got so much praise. For starters it’s amazingly beautiful, in both the visual scenery and the quality of the animation - much of that “guaranteed” to feel natural through physics simulation. That animation melds perfectly with the controls, so things like jumping onto a rope and watching it ripple and sway just felt right, and the “nope, I’m not quite in the right spot to climb this box, let’s try now…” bother that often arises in this kind of game was almost completely absent. The slow pace does help, too - not once did I run off a ledge without jumping - but nonetheless it’s a success in intuitive gameplay. Indeed the lack of a HUD or hint displays of any kind was incredibly refreshing.
Unfortunately intuition becomes a bit of a casualty in another way - the game gets more “gamey” in the latter half when you start encountering machinery of various kinds. While I thought the majority of the puzzles were well constructed (I was stumped quite often, but always found the answer soon after that, which is about how this sort of game should be working optimally), I ended up missing the simple boy-journeys-through-an-uncaring-world feel of the earlier parts. The spider, for instance, provided its own sort of mini-narrative, and once past that and into an area of pumps and elevators and buzzsaws, it was never really replaced by anything. I loved the first moment I first saw a chimney and silhouetted roof tiles and realised I was on someone’s house, and I loved the first time I pulled a switch and the whole world rotated, but beyond that,I really did lose connection to the fiction. It’s the difference between jumping across an electrified neon sign that’s rusted and collapsing, and jumping over an electrified floor that only exists to be an electrified floor. Gravity fields were probably the worst offender in the “why is this in the world?” category, and even if the game would have had to end earlier, I think it would have been better off removing a few elements.
That probably sounds like more of a complaint than it is. Like I said, the puzzles were (mostly) well designed, with some being very inventive, and there’s a nice constant flow to your actions throughout the game - make it rain in one area, then use rainwater to fill a pool, then close a floodgate, then float higher etc etc. The game looks and plays beautifully, and even if the mood falters in parts, what is there works really well. It just reaches a bit too far, and so isn’t quite cohesive enough to really stick in my mind as a personal classic. But hey, there are far worse things to say about a game than “it’s got too many good ideas in it”, and I’m looking forward to seeing what these guys do next.
Testing, testing…
Okay so there’s a blog here now. I can type in it. Words happen.
Words happen, dudes.
