The Halo franchise is much beloved by a rather large group of people, and it has some prime real estate in my heart. There have been scientific studies done in the past that have concluded that everyone digs giant robots, especially chicks.
Omni Consumer Products latest Detroit clean-up mech
It would then stand to reason that the inclusion of mechs in Halo 4 should be like chocolate and peanut butter. Alas the concoction is more akin to turkey gravy and whole peanuts. Sure you can mix them, but the end result is a gritty brown mess. Halo 4's primary antagonist is one of the worst character designs I've ever had had the displeasure to lay eyes on, but my main complaint here is that Halo 4's Mantis is a poor design.
This 30-second commercial for World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria has been blasting me in the face everywhere I look, from TV to website banner ads to pre-video ads on YouTube. And it's everything wrong with game marketing today.
Why does a trailer for one of the biggest games in the industry neglect to feature any actual gameplay footage? The intricate cinematic isn't even using World of Warcraft's in-game engine. I understand it's hard to convey a great video game through a non-interactive medium like television, but surely we can find a way that includes any of the game at all?
And it's not limited to WoW. Beginning perhaps with Halo 3 in 2007, live-action and cinematic TV commercials for big-name game releases have become the way to go.
I'm not saying these commercials are bad, per se. But it's embarrassing that we as an industry are so ashamed of the quality of our gameplay that all our marquee titles go out of their way not to show what the actual game looks like. And what's worse, gamers embrace these "cinematic" trailers. This one for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 starring Everyman Gamer Jonah Hill and zero gameplay footage is considered by its top YouTube commenter to be "probably one of the best trailers ever made for a shooter game."
Maybe it's because developers realize that what the games actually look like is a huge turn-off to casual audiences. Back to World of Warcraft, would you want a sizzle trailer on national TV featuring this?
From the first page of Google image search results for "mists of pandaria gameplay"
Something
has stunted the growth of first-person shooters. In the era of the
Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, FPS games released this generation have made baby
steps to distance themselves from their predecessors. They still wet
the bed.
The Call of Duty
and Halo
franchises need to be thanked for the last three core gameplay
enhancements in the FPS genre. They were:
Regenerating health
Aiming down the sight (iron sights)
Dedicated buttons for grenades, melee
attacks, and shooting
These have become staples.
The problem is these mechanics were introduced last
generation.
Gameplay-wise, nothing new has been implemented during the days of the PS3 and
Xbox 360. With this generation in its twilight years, the FPS genre
needs a new horse to step up and introduce an original
core gameplay mechanic. FPS veterans know even "new" innovations like perks and killstreak rewards were originally found in Counter-Strike server mods.
Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
Gaining
experience and unlockables are just measures to ensure players come back
for more, which is what good gameplay should do. This generation
has only made FPS games more addicting by borrowing elements from
MMOs, and previous shooters like DICE's Battlefield
series
which made its debut in 2002, ten
years ago. Addiction drives sales (ask a crack dealer), but it used
to be addicting gameplay that kept bringing players back. The future FPS
needs to be laced with original gameplay, not just unlockables and
experience points.
The divorce
between storytelling and gameplay has plagued video games
since birth. Gameplay seems to get the games during the week, and maybe storytelling
gets to see them on weekends. While never perfect, this upbringing seemed
serviceable through games’ Reagan-era infancy. But games are finally reaching a
twenty-first-century adolescence, and they’re developing an identity of their
own. And now they ask for not just gameplay, or storytelling! They ask for
both! They’ll have their cake and eat it too! They want to bring the parents
back together into holy matrimony! But like any awkward teenager, this transformation
is rife with missteps. There’s a hope, though, that one day games will inherit
the best traits of both storytelling and gameplay to become something greater.
Something that no other medium for art can create. Something that matters.
Valve’s
Half-Life 2 is the final product of
this drawn-out metaphor. I know it's been played to death in game academia circles, but there's a reason for that. It exorcises all of gaming’s storytelling vs. gameplay
demons, and creates an art experience that could not be accomplished in any
other medium—and isn’t that what all games should strive to do? Its
storytelling and gameplay are married beautifully, without sacrifice on either
end of the spectrum. First-person shooters have been done before, but none of
them perfects this balance the way Half-Life
2 does. Valve’s storytelling immerses the player in the gameplay, and the
gameplay immerses the player in the story. How does Half-Life 2 do it?
Raph
Koster writes in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design that all games, no matter how little storytelling is
involved, require some sort of surrounding fiction. From chess to BioShock, “designers put artwork on
[game systems] that is suggestive of some real-world context.” Even in chess,
the gameplay is infinitely deep, yet it’s all underneath a fiction of medieval
warfare, with queens, pawns, and knights. Early video games featured
superficial fictions like this as well, whether it was staving off space
invaders or a plumber saving a princess. But at the end of the day, people
didn’t play Donkey Kong to get insight
into a fat Italian man’s hopes and fears. They played Donkey Kong because the gameplay was fun.
