Note: This email exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo originally ran on N'Gai Croal's Level Up and MTV's Multiplayer blog, in four separate installments, from September 17th-20th 2007. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.
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Bioshock, from 2K Boston/Australia and 2K Games
Even though we sang the praises of short session games in our previous exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, late summer and early fall bring with them the interactive entertainment industry's heavy hitters, and Vs. Mode is always prepared to serve when duty calls. In this installment, which is also being posted on Totilo's blog MTV News: Multiplayer, we take aim at two of this year's most anticipated games: BioShock, developed by 2K Boston/Australia and published by 2K Games, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo. Both games put a spin on the first-person shooter--BioShock with its role-playing game elements; Metroid Prime 3 with its emphasis on exploration and environmental navigation--so we thought it appropriate to compare and contrast as Totilo and Level Up combat one another. Read on.
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To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: August 24, 2007
Re: Shook Ones
N'Gai,
We're done talking about short games and back to the big stuff, specifically BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I beat the first game. I haven't even started the second, because the advance delivery I was expecting of the game got, well, kind of corrupted.
So BioShock. They say it's a perfect 10. Game Informer did. 1up did. Ace Gamez did. They don't all say that. Edge magazine gave it an 8. I started playing the game before I read the reviews. In fact, I didn't know this game was allegedly perfect until after I finished it. I actually went into it blind.
No, scratch that. I didn't go into it blind. I went into it a bit prejudiced, expecting trouble.
Let me give you my "brief" history of following BioShock. I first heard of the game at E3 2006 two Mays ago. People were buzzing about this great game in the Take 2 booth. According to my meticulously kept files I went to see the game at 9:30 AM, on Friday, May 12th of that year. My BioShock meeting occurred a half hour after [Microsoft Game Studios boss] Shane Kim no-showed a scheduled interview with me and right before I had to swim into the raucous crowd at the EA booth to conduct a shout-interview with the makers of Crysis. From 9:30 until 10, in a darkened closed-door private booth, BioShock mastermind Ken Levine ran the demo. He talked a great game, but what I saw didn't do it for me. I saw pretty water effects that served no gameplay purpose. He talked about interesting moral choices but could only name this one thing about rescuing or killing creepy "Little Sisters" that were protected by monstrous "Big Daddies." And this one female enemy in a green dress kept attacking the game's first-person hero. Levine seemed like a nice guy, but when other reporters said this game was the Best of Show, I scoffed.
I didn't pay much attention to the game after that. Any time I heard about it, it just sounded like more of the same: Little Sisters, Big Daddies, moral choices. It seemed to me that Levine and team weren't showing much breadth. In the fall, my games-scripting pal Susan O'Connor told me that I really needed to talk to Levine again. She believed in BioShock (she was also being paid to work on it).
I consented and interviewed Levine in January. He gave great quotes--"Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Aliens' or variations of that. There's great things in that, but you need some variety... Look, I just steal from other sources."--but great quotes don't make a great game. I went to a couple of demos of the game. Levine was at them too. He kept talking about Big Daddies. Enough! Didn't this game have anything else going for it?
The last time I went to a demo of the game before actually playing it myself--the meticulous notes mark this moment as June 19, 2006, 10:00AM--Levine at least showed me the game's photography system. Something unexpected! I had hope.
As you well know, the game is, actually, wonderful. My skepticism may have been healthy but it was unwarranted. BioShock is a superb game. I love the setting. I enjoy the range of choice available to my character. And the game peaks late, which is something that I, a gaming completist, genuinely appreciate.
What I like most about this game are the things Levine was talking about from the start. And what I like most about those things is what I didn't like about them at the start:
- The World of Rapture. The flooded undersea 1950s city had looked cool at E3 2006, but, as I mentioned, I was dismayed that the submerged metropolis and its wonderfully rendered water served no gameplay function. The setting seemed incidental. It had no bearing on that very essence of video games: what you do via the controls. But after having spent 16 hours virtually in Rapture, I have re-learned the value of good setting. It need not affect the gameplay. It need not matter even to the level design. It may merely be original to serve its purpose. It may merely be a special place unlike any I've been to before.
One of the things I'll grumble about with video games is how most locations in them are unoriginal, uninteresting and forgettable. I have been on real-life vacations for fewer days in my life than I have been in virtual video game worlds, and yet I can probably describe an interesting place from each of those vacations but not from most of those games. I have spent more time in various homes than I have spent in virtual worlds and I can probably describe an interesting place in each of those homes but not from most of those games. Why, when given an infinite canvas, do so many game designers paint such traditional landscapes? Where are video games' Eiffel Towers and Grand Canyons? Their Easter Island statues and Taj Mahals? Their Chocolate Factories and Bat Caves? Their Yellow Brick Roads and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?
Thirty, forty years in, video games, I am sad to report, are without many famous landmarks and places. N'Gai, can you name a single famous video game building? Princess Peach's castle (and courtyard) from Super Mario 64, maybe? Anything else? Yes I can recall locations in games. For example, I remember the giant vat containing a massive, submarine-sized floating mechanical shark in Banjo Kazooie, and I remember the green hill zone of Sonic: The Hedgehog. But the truly great places--the postcard-worthy ones--include, for me, just the moon in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the big sword bridge in God of War, Sanctuary Fortress in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and, not much else. Almost every other spot--even the fun ones--from Dracula's Castle to Vice City feels generic, familiar, or plain unspectacular.
And because of this, I welcome Rapture. It is a place that looks like no other I've been to in video games. Who cares if there's a gameplay significance to its rising flood-waters! It's a special, specific place. I'd like to go to a few more.
- The Big Daddy-Little Sister Moral Dilemma. It turns out there really weren't any other moral dilemmas in BioShock besides the choice to rescue or kill the Little Sisters. I was right to think Levine wasn't going to pose any other ethical challenges to the player. But I was wrong to think that would be a problem. Those big, hulking, lumbering, Big Daddies--the protectors of the Little Sisters that appear about two or three times per level--are the games' best characters. Garnett Lee on the 1Up Yours podcast even called them the best enemies ever in a video game, a judgment we should probably weigh in on. Their rage is impressive, but so too is their interplay with the spooky little girls that beckon and guide them as if they're the family dog. To repeatedly witness those interactions and to, early on, know the calming influence a Little Sister has over the locomotive might of Big Daddy, makes the player's interaction with each Daddy-Sister pair feel not just like interaction but intrusion. To simply interfere with their walks and their scavenging feels like a moral choice. They weren't bothering me, and if not for the voice in my ear telling me to proceed through the game by attacking, I wouldn't be bothering them. That I will then kill the Big Daddy no matter what feels somewhat heinous. It is always unprovoked--a pre-emptive strike, at best. The fact that once I've caused one death (the Big Daddy's) I have to decide whether to cause a second (the Little Sister's) feels like a mock-moral choice. For the record, I always chose to save the Little Sisters.
I can't say my choice was a purely ethical one. When you are first asked to decide whether to kill or save the first Little Sister, you are presented the choice not simply as a moral quandary (freedom vs. an end to misery) but as a wager on personal benefit. Take the greater immediate prize of 160 points of Adam energy for killing a Little Sister, or the smaller prize of 80 points with the promise of occasional gifts for sparing one? Let's make a deal! This, ultimately, is what almost every moral choice in video games I've ever encountered boils down to: how will each path benefit me? We can write a doctoral thesis on whether all moral choices in real life can also be quantified in the same way, but at least in life, we can probably assume that empathy plays some role--that care for others is somewhat relevant to what we do. In games, it's easy to think of a virtual character as a group of illuminated TV pixels. No little girl, thankfully, is going to live or die because of BioShock. But if I kill a virtual one I might be able to upgrade my ability to shoot fireballs from my left hand.
When we play games we are consciously and subconsciously constantly running the numbers, constantly grokking the system. We're noticing patterns that let us deduce that we don't really need to play a realistic game of football; we can just run the same few Madden plays that always guarantee a touchdown. We don't need to really sneak through Splinter Cell. We can get through just as well by taking advantage of this blind spot in the enemy's artificial intelligence and that unrealistic logic of the levels' alarms. In games developers often want us to see actions and images and words and movements. So often we see through it all: we see the math. Until now I've seen the math in game's moral choices. Piling on the ethical dilemmas in other games has just made the math more obvious and my view of them more cynical. So instead of cluttering the game with a carnival of conundrums, Levine pared the key decisions down to one--one that you are asked again and again. Far enough into the game, the choice to save or kill is no longer a true choice but a reminder of the path you had chosen. It is no longer, "Are you sure you want to save the next one too?" It was "You're going to save this one like you did the last nine and deal with the consequences, right?"
The value of the Big Daddy-Little Sister Dilemma isn't in making the player make a choice, but in making the player ultimately accept--or challenge--their own commitment to that choice by asking the same question again and again. This is not at all the way developers have presented ethical choice in games before, and it's not even how the big moral-dilemma game of 2007, the "Jack Bauer in space" sci-fi epic Mass Effect, is being presented. For BioShock, I think Levine made a wonderful choice.
Those are the two key elements I like about BioShock. I believe you really liked the game as well. What made it a winner for you? Was it the fact that BioShock is just a re-mix of Metal Gear Solid 2?
-Stephen
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To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: September 1, 2007
Re: The Feel-Bad Game Theory Of The Year
Now the first time you kill somebody, that's the hardest. I don't give a s--t if you're f---in' Wyatt Earp or Jack the Ripper. Remember that guy in Texas? The guy up in that f---in' tower that killed all them people? I'll bet you green money that first little black dot he took a bead on, that was the bitch of the bunch. First one is tough, no f---in' foolin'. The second one...the second one ain't no f---in' Mardi Gras either, but it's better than the first one 'cause you still feel the same thing, you know...except it's more diluted, you know it's...it's better. I threw up on the first one, you believe that? Then the third one...the third one is easy, you level right off. It's no problem. Now...s--t...now I do it just to watch their f---in' expression change.
--Virgil to Alabama Worley in "True Romance"
Stephen,
You're the one who always feels as though there's not enough conflict between us--that there's not enough vs. on Vs. Mode. Then you deliberately go and choose two of the three things that I liked most about BioShock to talk about in your opener. If you were a Little Sister, I'd harvest you for your insolence.
You pointed out in your first post that many games don't create memorable locations. That's strange, because as Clive Thompson recently pointed out in a Wired.com piece about Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, architecture is at the core of game design. He wrote:
Basically, if you strip away the ghouls and enchanted magikal [sic] attacks, it's a game about ... architecture.
Yet here's the thing: In a way, all games are. That's what "level design" is, after all: Architecture and landscape design. If you listen to gamers rave--or complain--about their latest title, half the time they're talking about what urban theorists would call the "built environment."
When we assess the multiplayer maps for Halo 3, we argue about whether there are enough nooks to hide inside, or sufficiently sneaky promontories from which to snipe. We whine about the monotonous corridor design in most RPGs. One of my only major complaints about Super Paper Mario was entirely architectural: The game forced you to ponderously double back every time you wanted to reach a save point.
Here's another thing that many games don't do: create truly memorable openings. Perhaps that's because they're too focused on teaching us the controls, hitting us with a chunk of narrative or both. But regardless of why this occurs, I think these two problems are actually related. Too many games whisk us from environment to environment in a way that doesn't feel particularly connected. The best games figure out how to seamlessly weave narrative, tutorial and setting in a way that, to paraphrase the old Origin Systems motto, creates a world.
The first God of War kicked off with a short but compelling burst of non-interactive narrative: Kratos looks directly at the player, says "The gods of Olympus have abandoned me. There is no hope," then throws himself off a cliff, with Linda Hunt's literary narration kicking in as he falls towards his death. It immediately created a sense of mystery--why did he do that?--before Sony Santa Monica serves up its next trick, shamelessly and smartly stolen from the James Bond and Indiana Jones movies: a pedal-to-the-metal opening sequence where the player-as-Kratos battles his way through undead soldiers en route to a face off with a massive hydra, parts of which we see breaking through ships on our way to confront it. By the time we finally defeat the colossal beast, we're thinking, "That's how you open a videogame."
By contrast, Half-Life's opening took a more subtle, quotidian approach that befitted its near-future storyline, with the game's now-legendary tram ride through the Black Mesa Research Facility. From the clinical female voice recording that provides information about the installation to the images of spider-shaped robots and massive airlock doors, to the greeting of familiarity from a security guard ("Morning, Mr. Freeman. Looks like you're running late."), with minimalist credits, the Valve takes its time to seduce us step-by-step into believing that we're really are in this place at this time.
BioShock's opening does a bit of both. There's a title card that reads "1960. Mid Atlantic." As our protagonist, Jack, looks at a wallet photo of a boy and his parents, we hear his voice-over. "They told me, 'Son, you're special. You were born to do great things.' You know what? They were right." As the voice-over wraps up, he looks at a box wrapped with a bow and a note on it, before the screen goes to black, followed immediately by the sounds of engine failure, screams, and a plane crash. After the BioShock logo comes up, dripping water, we return to Jack's point of view, underwater, as shoes, handbags, jewelry and a plane's fuselage sink past him while we struggle to get to the surface. As we do, we gasp for air, surrounded by flames. We swim over to the tail of the plane, but before we can get to it, a jet of fire streaks over to the tail wing, triggering an explosion that causes the tail to sink.
To our right, however, we see a massive lit pillar protruding from the water. We swim over. We enter the open door which slams shut behind us, leaving us in pitch-black darkness. Then lights come up, revealing a towering bronze statue and a sign that reads "No Gods Or Kings. Only Man." Then we hear the strains of period pop-jazz. As we walk over to a nearby staircase, a series of lights are triggered, urging us forward until we reach a bathysphere. We activate it, and it takes us down into the water, past a series of depth indicators, bringing up a "News on the March"-style newsreel about Andrew Ryan's vision, before finally revealing the submerged city of Rapture in all of its Art Deco, neon-drenched glory. Before we've even docked in Rapture, before the next several moments when the game skillfully tips over from the mysterious into the macabre, the brutal and the terrifying, Irrational Games aka 2K Bostralia has already persuaded us to believe in their world, hook, line and sinker. Because if you believe the architecture, if you believe the landscape, you're much more likely to believe the experience. And the more you believe this particular experience, the more you're going to be challenged by BioShock's central moral dilemma.
Sometimes I wonder, do I deserve to live/Or am I going to burn in hell for all the things I did?
--Mobb Deep, Shook Ones Part II
Before I began playing BioShock, I already knew that I was going to harvest the Little Sisters. What I hadn't counted on was how difficult that decision was going to be when it finally came time to make it. You and I were playing the game on separate machines in separate rooms, as we'd requested. I'd gotten to 2K's offices about forty-five minutes after the appointed time, which meant that you were already ahead of me. So when I finally got to my first Little Sister; after hearing conflicting advice from Atlas (harvest her!) and Tenenbaum (rescue her!); after the little girl? little monster? scrambled away from me only to be cornered against a storage trunk, whimpering with fear, here's what came up on the screen:
CHOOSE whether to RESCUE the Little Sister or HARVEST HER.
If you harvest her, you get MAXIMUM ADAM to spend on plasmids, but she will NOT SURVIVE the process.
If you rescue her, you get LESS ADAM, but Tenenbaum has promised to make it WORTH YOUR WHILE.
X: Harvest
Y: Rescue
My finger was hovering over the X button, ready to harvest...and all of a sudden, I couldn't do it. There was a little girl, albeit virtual, cowering in front of my avatar, and I couldn't bring myself to harvest her, as she'd been presented far too sympathetically. At the same time, I couldn't bring myself to rescue her either, because I wanted that Adam. Yet there was another complicating factor, one which is the true mark of the brilliance of BioShock's fiendish conundrum: the promise of an unspecified reward from Tenenbaum for rescuing the Little Sister.
What was puzzling me was the nature of Levine's game. He was pitting my basic humanity against my greedy self-interest and against my curiosity--a cruel hybrid of a moral dilemma fused with the Trust Game. This was a far more devilish problem than had it been a simple binary either/or, and it had completely paralyzed me. Should I treat this game as a Rorschach blot and do what I would do in real life: rescue the Little Sister? Or should I treat it solely as a fantasy and do precisely the opposite, explore the road I'd never take in the real world. I didn't know what to do.
So I set down my controller. And I called my sisters to help me figure out what I should do.
Neither of them picked up.
Next, I called you on your cell. But you didn't pick up either.
At the time, I thought I was calling them--and you--for advice. But as I look back at that moment more honestly, what I was actually hoping to do was pawn off the responsibility for whatever decision I was going to make on either my sisters or you. I figured that my sisters would tell me to rescue rather than harvest, so I would do that. Or I figured that you would almost certainly inform me that you'd chosen to rescue the Little Sisters, freeing me to do the opposite--purely in the interest of providing a more contentious Vs. Mode for our Dear Readers. But with no-one answering their phones, I was once again left to agonize over my decision. And after fifteen minutes of back and forth, weighing pros, cons and my own roiling unease, I decided to be bloody, bold and resolute.
I chose to harvest the Little Sister. And I was disappointed in what followed.
SPOILER ALERT!
MASSIVE SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!
There was an almost imperceptible jump cut from the Little Sister lying on the floor to her being held up in front of me by my left hand. As she struggled, protested (through sounds, not words) and tried in vain to fend me off, the fingers on my right hand curled menacingly. My right hand came up slightly, then the screen went first green, a thumping noise was heard, then the screen went black, after a which a couple of non-human squealing sounds were heard. When the screen returned to normal, I was holding a wriggling, slug-like mass in my left hand. Adam.
I was extremely disappointed because Levine's too-discreet portrayal of the harvesting and its aftermath didn't make me feel as bad as I thought it should have. It wasn't graphic enough. By that, I don't mean that he should have shown me killing the Little Sister, nor am I saying that I wanted to see that. But there are other things that he could have done--shadow play; disturbing soundscapes; abstract images; the Little Sister's dress left behind in my right hand--to make me feel the weight of my virtual actions more strongly than I did. I felt far worse trying to make the decision than I did seeing the result of that decision carried out. In other words, I was bummed that I wasn't more bummed.
After I harvested the Little Sister, Atlas told me that I'd done the right thing, while Tenenbaum asked how I could do that to a child. Yet she still held out the promise of redemption, of pulling back from the abyss, by adding, "There are other little ones who need your help. Will you be as cruel?" But at this point, having already gone down the harvesting path, I was now focused on coldly and rationally grokking the system, as you put it, rather than any bleeding heart concerns about facing this moral dilemma when I encountered the next Little Sister. (We'll discuss the "fairness" of Levine's system next time.) I had my 160 Adam in hand, and once I saw what it could buy, I wasn't willing to settle for less. Not for an unspecified gift. Also, I assumed that any Achievements would be rewarded in a binary fashion, for either harvesting all of the Little Sisters or killing all of the Little Sisters. Since I was already fallen, I figured that I might as well keep going down this path and hope that the devil would have sympathy for me.
You'll recall that in our Manhunt 2 Vs. Mode, I wrote about action, reaction and repetition being the foundation of videogames, which brings with it both a higher body count in games than in other media and, necessarily, a certain numbness to this amount of virtual violence. Once I'd already decided to stare into the abyss, the second Little Sister became much easier for me to harvest than the first, the third even easier than the second, and so on until my biggest dilemma was figuring out whether I had enough ammo and Eve to take down a Big Daddy so that I could get to its Little Sister...
...until, much later on in the game, after I was saved by a Little Sister and guided by her to the room where, it's revealed, Tenenbaum houses the Little Sisters that she has rescued. As the strains of "God Bless the Child That's Got His Own," plays in the safe house, I saw that I was surrounded by little sisters, their eyelines matching mine, their eyes tracking me as I moved about the small room. One said, "Who's he?" The other replied, "He's the one who hurts us." "He's mean," says another. "Stay away from him," says yet another.
After that, it was as though my conscience had been re-awakened--and it didn't even take a Little Sister to provoke that realization. Upon leaving Tenebaum's Halfway House For Wayward Girls, I came upon a Splicer with its back turned to me...and I couldn't kill it. At least not right away. BioShock had always portrayed the doomed denizens of Rapture as tragic figures even amidst their relentless hostility, to the point where I'd once or twice felt guilty for looting their corpses--but only after I'd electrocuted them, burnt them, shot them, blown them up, beaten their brains out or watched them stung to death by my killer bees, of course. But here, right on the heels of my Jiminy Cricket moment, I didn't want to take out this Splicer. Yet the only way to proceed was to do so. There would be no phone calls to you or my sisters this time. I'd been in Rapture long enough to know what I had to do.
And when I finally, inevitably, inexorably encountered the next Little Sister, I harvested her immediately. I hit the X button as fast as I could to avoid that long, drawn out moment of doubt and pain, of agonizing over what course of action to take. I didn't want to think about it any more. Even now, as I write about this, I can feel my stomach tightening with the real discomfort provoked by the memories of my virtual deliberations.
Bummer accomplished. Masterfully.
Cheers,
N'Gai
Next: The dearth of great openings, debated. The importance of strong art direction, asserted. And the unbearable unfairness of BioShock's "morality system," eviscerated.
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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption screenshot from Retro Studios and Nintendo
In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange on Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, which is also being posted on Totilo's blog MTV News: Multiplayer, both Totilo and the Level Up staff praised Bioshock's central moral dilemma: whether to rescue or harvest the Little Sisters. In our second installment, Totilo disputes our claim that many videogames don't have memorable openings, then goes on to examine why sequels often rob players of the abilities and/or weapons they had in the prior game, forcing them to start levelling up all over again. For our part, we defend our assertion about game introductions and nitpick Totilo's reflections on game empowerment by pitting him against one of his game developer heroes before taking issue--at length--with the manner in which the makers of BioShock chose to privilege Rescuers over Harvesters. Read on.
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To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: September 7, 2007
Re: Now You're Playing With New Power
N'Gai,
In your last letter you said, "many games" don't "create truly memorable openings." I say, "Thank you for saying something I strongly disagree with so I can power through a response and weave in some comments about the other game featured in this month's Vs. Mode."
On the lack of memorable openings... If we're talking about great first levels, then I submit that we are embarrassed by the rich number of them. Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 both present strong, gameplay-packed sequences in distinct settings that make the first hour of those games unforgettable. The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time might have its best dungeon right at the start (sorry, Forest Temple fans). Super Mario 64 opens with a joyful interactive romp in a castle courtyard that is among the best 3D levels ever programmed. Super Metroid begins with a smart homage to the end of Metroid, then segues to a stretch of desolate exploration set in the ruins of the final stages of the series' first game--as perfect an establishment of mood and setting as I've seen in a video game.
A lack of memorable openings? I can't agree. But I will sign on to a petition for more meaningful openings, openings that say something more about the game we're starting than what the controls are. It's interesting to me that while you rightly and repeatedly state that games are first and foremost about what you, as the player-character, do, the openings you praised from God of War, Half-Life and BioShock de-emphasize their game's particular control and gameplay innovations in order to stress character and setting. (I would add the playable prison-break dream that opens The Chronicles of Riddick: Butcher Bay to your list.) These games suggest that who and where you are matters and is worth caring about as much as whatever the control scheme is. (This is particularly interesting in BioShock's case, since the game then doesn't ask you to focus on the "who" part again for several hours; shifting focus to the "where" and the "what you're doing").
All of this talk about game openings got me thinking about the other game in our Vs Mode, Metroid Prime 3. As you well know, one of the most debated styles of opening a game is the one Metroid Prime 3 ditched. We should talk about how the game's development team at Retro Studios altered their approach. Can I coin the technique they used in earlier Metroid Prime games as the "Loss Lead-in"? It comes in a couple of flavors. There's the "Yanked Serving," which gives the starting player a taste of the powers they will achieve later in the game only to take them away after a playable intro (see Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2, and, sort of, MGS 3: Snake Eater.) There's the "Revoked License" which lets you start a sequel with the abilities you had in the earlier game, only to strip you of them so you can begin a quest for a new set of powers (see God of War II.) I expected Prime 3 to go with one of these--the second, actually, which would have been an ideal way to show people they too should have completed Prime 2 and earned the ability to see sound. Instead, the game was designed to open in a more conventional manner. Like many a Zelda game Prime 3 initially equips its lead character with a small set of moves, the rest to be added throughout the game--and never is an ability subtracted.
Is this progress? It still drives me batty that Link seldom, if ever, begins his adventures with his boomerang and bombs or even a decent-sized wallet. At least Samus begins this one already capable of rolling into a ball, dropping bombs, jumping a second jump when reaching the height of her first jump. Has Retro, the development studio behind the Prime series made the right call? I used to wonder if the "Yanked Serving" intros of the previous two games in the series hurt more than they helped, requiring novice players to do too much too soon rather than easing them I gently. Does Prime 3 make things a little easier? Is that the game's mild concession to the Wii's unintimidating-games-for-everyone mission statement?
I have a hard time answering these questions because I'm the guy who has asked Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma if they'll ever make a game in which you do start with the boomerang and bow and arrow. I asked him that because I'm a veteran gamer and don't need the training wheels. I know how to ride the bike.
I'm OK with a game starting me off with an array of abilities, especially those that are not new to the new game. I just don't want to start the next Zelda or Metroid or Metal Gear with every new ability introduced in the game, and that's because of the thing that I think video games do best--and that Metroid games do better than most everything else in the medium--gradually empower the player.
Empowerment. Have the great character-driven games ever offered a better quality than that? The fantasy, sometimes realized, of going to the gym in real life is that lifting a certain amount of weight a certain number of times will make me stronger so I can lift more. The promise, sometimes honored, by school is that studying this subject and getting that score on a test will make me capable of some wonderful professional achievement like managing a McDonalds or transplanting a heart. This is one life dream: that a person's persistence and periodic achievement will help them realize their potential to become or re-make who they are. Empowerment is not the top of every song or movie or book. But I'd wager that the majority of long-form single player video games are. Halo, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Pokemon, Call of Duty.... all these games present the empowerment fantasy. They advance the player through an experience that leaves the player-character more powerful and more capable than they began. Sometimes the improvement the player achieves comes from repeated action and gained skill. Sometimes the improvement comes from how the games are programmed: the more you do in the game, the more powerful the designers make you.
For better or worse, and as shallow as it can be, I love this. In fact, despite my gut instinct that BioShock is the better game (it's more original, more thought-provoking, more heavily populated with awesome Big Daddies), I've been more thrilled playing Metroid Prime 3. Why? Because Metroid games deliver on the empowerment fantasy. They promise the experience of feeling like a wimp in the beginning and turning into a super-hero. Through expert pacing, lovely art direction and a splendid, gradual arming of excellent powers, the Prime games deliver. Did I mention that the previous game rewarded my dedication to all that exploration by granting me the late-game ability to see sound?
I'll accept a pretty difficult workout routine if the game is going to give me a great power. (This has its pitfalls; I've been suckered into plenty of games that demand a mind-numbing grind.) I also don't mind being reminded of my relative weakness early in a game. In fact, I like that too. Call me a masochist, but one of my favorite experiences in gaming is encountering some inaccessible hatch in a Metroid Prime, recognizing that I can't get through it yet but knowing that some time later in the game I'll gain the ability to go through said hatch and will be able to come back and figure out what's back there. This experience calls for backtracking. Many people hate it. I don't.
But I digress. Back to the empowerment thing. I am sure there are gamers who prefer to feel a sense of achievement that is earned by practice and with skill. To get better at Tony Hawk or multi-player Halo, for instance, you need to commit to the game and sharpen your own abilities. In a game like Metroid, however, you pretty much get the sense of achievement automatically. In due time the game doles out each cool power. I like taking that ride, but I can see why some people would find it banal and maybe even against the spirit of playing a game. I wonder how such people would judge the empowerment granted to players of BioShock. Unlike Metroid Prime, BioShock is designed to let players choose how to improve their abilities. Do I give my guy the ability to command swarms of bees? Or do I go for the add-on that makes hacking computers easier? The game doesn't force many upgrades on you, so the way you are empowered is up to you. But you do have to power yourself up in some way, and the gains you make aren't solely based on skill. You just buy that bee-swarm move. It's not like you have to learn how to master it. In theory I like the BioShock approach best. Choice is good, right? In execution, I prefer the specific progression of gaining abilities in Metroid Prime 3. I like being able to turn into a ball early in the game and then, later, becoming a magnetic ball. That's improvement! What do you prefer? Enforced, scripted progression (Metroid)? Progression that involves choice (BioShock)? Or almost purely skill-based progression (Tony Hawk, Madden)?
Another questions for the room...What is more interesting: An added power that gives you a new way to interact with the game world? Or one that gives you a more spectacular way to kill something? In BioShock most of the upgrades I found were of the second variety. I could freeze a guy or I could burn him. I could shoot him with a shotgun. I could shoot him with a more powerful shotgun. I could program a turret to kill him for me. There were some powers that didn't completely fit that category, and they were among my favorite powers of the game: things like being able to automatically hack any electrified robot, which I earned by taking a lot of photos of such robots, or being able to turn a "Big Daddy" to my side. Compare that to the other game we're discussing. What I enjoyed with the Metroid Prime series is the degree to which the new powers you gain are designed to give you mastery not of your enemies but of your surroundings. To me that makes the most out of the great rooms and levels the best-looking games can put you in. It makes less of the game world something to just look at and more of it something with which to interact.
And speaking of art and level design, much praise goes to 2K Boston/Australia and to Retro Studios for the look of both of the games. BioShock and Metroid Prime 3 benefit from developers who have the time, the budget and the talent to respect the players' innate desire to see cool stuff. Both games keep the repetition of graphics to a minimum. But... I have a complaint to file in 2K's direction. What happened to the idea of a quiet moment? Early in BioShock the player enters and explores Rapture in near-solitude. Enemy encounters are infrequent and the player is free--I'd say encouraged--to explore and enjoy the wondrous scenery. You spend a lot of time early in the game looking instead of doing. Then chaos ensues and the game rarely slows down again. Metroid, on the other hand, is designed to encourage a lot of gazing. I wouldn't have wanted to see BioShock adopt Metroid's detective-story-style pacing, but a little more quiet may have improved the rhythm of the game. Do you agree that developers don't provide quiet moments often enough? So many games are non-stop cacophony, and squander the impact of a quiet, mood-setting moment. To offer another example, one of my favorite moments of Gears of War was a slow walk you had to take through an impoverished town--no fighting; just soaking in the atmosphere.
I don't want to go on much more here, as I've thrown a lot of new stuff on the table. A few other things for you to toy with, though:
- Do you see developers reaching a limit on the powers they grant players, a drying well of variations on projectile weapons, laser beams and hacking techniques?
- If the Metroid Wii controls are as good as Nintendo advertises them to be--"The best first-person game controls ever made!"--then what kind of mass-appeal games should they use them for? I'm thinking the average non-hardcore Wii owner might like a first-person paparazzi game.
Back to you...
-Stephen
***
To: Stephen Totilo
Fr: N'Gai Croal
Date: September 9, 2007
Re: Taking A Wrench To BioShock
Stephen,
You must have caught me in a good mood. Because for once, rather than taunt you by refusing to answer your questions or address the points you've raised, I'm actually going to tackle them--well, some of them, anyway--before I jump back in with what's been on my mind. Here goes:
1. "Many" is one of those wonderfully vague words that give us journalists plenty of wiggle room to sound authoritative without citing any real data. Well, let me raise the stakes of my original statement. I think that most people who play games would agree with me that many games don't have truly memorable openings. You've cited some terrific examples, but nowhere near enough to suggest that there are a "rich number" of games with stellar first levels. (Perhaps we should have Games For Lunch's Kyle Orland weigh in on this.) I'd even dispute your contention that Metal Gear Solid 3's first level is as memorable as that of Metal Gear Solid 2, which is exemplary from its opening cutscene of Snake walking across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to his boss battle with Olga Gurlukovich on the rain-swept deck of the tanker. Much of MGS3's opening is concerned with teaching players the game's new mechanics and controls, necessitated by the fact that Hideo Kojima's not-entirely-successful attempts to compensate for the problems created by his decision to eliminate the franchise's radar without also properly evolving the camera system. I could play the opening sequence of MGS2 over and over again. MGS3? Not so much.
2. I see that my love of neologisms has corrupted you. Good job on your analysis of Loss Lead-ins as a convention of game openings. Personally, I'm tired of the License Revoked approach to game design when it comes to sequels where I'm playing the same character.Yes, it's good game design, but only if you assume that the prototypical player is someone who never touched the previous entry. Even if the developers go through some minor contortions to come up with a rationale as to why they've stripped me of my abilities--a damaged power suit; a vengeful god--I still can't help but feel as though what's really at work is a combination of laziness and unquestioned assumptions about how games should be constructed.
When Blizzard releases an expansion pack, Level 60 players don't lose their gear or their abilities. Why don't non-MMO games borrow a page from that book? Let's say for argument's sake that BioShock 2 picked up somewhere between BioShock 1's interactive conclusion (the defeat of Fontaine) and its narrative conclusion (its "good" or "bad" endings), with Jack captured by the U.S. government and imprisoned in a top secret facility. It would therefore make sense that we veterans would begin the game with no weapons, but he could certainly still have all of his plasmids carried over from our BioShock 1 game saves, with brand-new abilities added as we play through BioShock 2. As for newbs, if no BioShock 1 game save is detected, or players want a refresher course, there could be a flashback, a dream sequence, a training course or an alternate path used to instruct newcomers on how to play the game. I realize that this could create balancing difficulties--the game would have to be scaled completely differently for experienced players and novices--but I still think it's high time developers started designing sequels in a way that properly respects the amount of time that veteran gamers have put into the previous game.
3. It's interesting to see you cite empowerment fantasies as the reason you prefer Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to BioShock. Your hero, indie game developer Jonathan Blow, would be sorely disappointed by your admitted shallowness. He reacted to a GameSetWatch post earlier this year of the video "The Most Powerful Person in the World," with the following comment:
a) As someone who is very much into games, the message seems a little too simplistic. Is it really good to be the pretend "most powerful person in the world", and is that where the medium ought to be heading, really?
(b) It reinforces the negative stereotypes of gamers: they are a bunch of nerds who are feeble in their real lives, so they live in a fantasy land where they are powerful. Is that the main thing you get out of games? Really?
You don't want to reinforce negative stereotypes of gamers, do you?
I'm not as doctrinaire as Blow on this subject. I will say, however, that many games are not as inventive as they could be in handling the concepts and themes of power and empowerment in videogames. When a game begins, the player is generally at some kind of systemic disadvantage: physical, geographic, narrative, informational, etc. Over the course of the game, the player steadily overcomes these challenges until he or she ultimately masters the game system; one could crudely describe this as a transfer of power from the game developer to the player. But this is another area of game design whose assumptions and conventions are rarely challenged. In Theatresports (competitive improv theater), there's a game called Status Transfer, where one side is Low Status and the other is High Status. The winner of the game is the side which comes up with the most creative and entertaining way--in word and/or in deed--to both demonstrate its initial status and gradually transfer its status to the other side. I'd suggest that status transfer in videogames is a fertile area for innovation.
As for whether I prefer the scripted progression of Metroid Prime 3's power-ups, the choice of BioShock's Plasmid economy, or the get-better-or-go-home skill-based progression of a Madden, it's like asking me if I prefer curried shrimp, bread pudding or gin and tonic. A game is in part a conversation between the developer and the player, and each has to be judged on its own merits. In gameplay terms, the Metroid series has from its inception always been about Samus doing battle with her environment in order to get from point A to point B moreso than her enemies, so its scripted progression makes sense. BioShock is about the player doing battle with the ecosystem of Rapture's enemies moreso than its environment, so letting the player choose which Plasmids and Tonics to equip also makes sense. And with Madden or Tony Hawk, their chaining of moment-to-moment gameplay decisions in order to achieve a specific goal would be undone if it weren't primarily based around the player's skill.
Did you really feel wimpy playing Metroid Prime 3, though? I don't think I've ever felt wimpy playing a Metroid game, and I don't think you're meant to. Samus may never start a game as powerful as she's going to be by the end, but she's never anything less than competent and quietly confident, no matter what challenge she's facing. I felt much wimpier as Jack in BioShock. I'm only 10 percent into Metroid Prime 3 (!), but I've yet to encounter anything as terrifying as the moment when my bathysphere touched down in Rapture, its interior lights went out, and a Splicer killed someone right in front of me, then began to cut its way into the bathysphere using an arc welder--and me without a single weapon. Now that's feeling wimpy.
4. You closed with two more questions. I'm not going to answer them yet, though. I have some other things I'd like to get to first.
"The problem is choice."
--Neo to the Architect in "The Matrix Reloaded"
Having lavishly praised BioShock in my previous post, I now return to bury it, sort of. Because after comparing notes with you, I'm convinced that you had a more complete experience than I did. And I think the fault lies not with me, but with 2K Bostralia. When you told me about the Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid, my first reaction was "How the heck did I miss that?" When I found out that players only get the plasmid if you rescue the Little Sisters, I was pissed, like a little kid stamping his feet and yelling "That's not fair!" Did 2K Bostralia make a moral judgment about the player's decision to kill or save Little Sisters by privileging Rescuers over Harvesters in giving Rescuers the Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid and not providing Harvesters a unique Plasmid of their own? And by doing so, have they unbalanced not the game, but rather the experience?
In theory, I should have applauded Levine and Co.'s creative decision. Why? The "morality systems" in most videogames are in fact amoral, because they strive to be symmetrical in gameplay terms so as not to unbalance the game and risk angering players by penalizing them for their choices. So what usually happens is that players are given different sets of special abilities, a la Knights of the Old Republic, or perhaps some cosmetic differences in the player avatar's appearance, a la Fable. (I once explained to Peter Molyneux that I thought Fable's equation of good with physical beauty and evil with physical grotesquery was overly simplistic and stereotypical; he agreed, but insisted that those iconographic shorthands worked well for gamers.) The whole thing is wrapped up with two or more endings--with one designated the "good" ending and one being the "bad" ending--but what's intended to be a moral choice ends up being expressed as a style of play, with nothing that really provokes the player emotionally or intellectually.
2K Bostralia took another approach with BioShock's asymmetrical reward structure. A Harvester like me gets 160 Adam per Little Sister killed, which enables me to to buy new Plasmids faster and/or level up those Plasmids more quickly. A rescuer like you only gets 80 Adam per Little Sister saved, making it harder for you to buy new Plasmids, and/or causing you to level up those Plasmids more slowly. But, as promised, Tenenbaum makes it "WORTH YOUR WHILE" by giving you a gift of 200 Adam for every three Little Sisters you save...along with the Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid1, which, from what I can see in these YouTube videos, is probably the single coolest Plasmid in the game. Crunching the numbers, I got 480 Adam for three Little Sisters harvested (160 per LS) and a quicker, linear leveling curve. You got 440 Adam per trio (147 per LS), a slower, stair-shaped leveling curve and that Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid. I think you can see why I'm upset.
In fairness to 2K Bostralia, it makes a certain narrative sense that a killer of Little Sisters would not get the Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid. But why no Hypnotize Splicer Plasmid? It would have partially preserved the asymmetry (rescuers still get the single coolest Plasmid, but harvesters get an interesting exclusive plasmid of their own); it would have fit nicely into the game's philosophy of letting the player mess with BioShock's ecosystem; and it would have laid the groundwork far better for the megalomaniacal "bad" ending, which in its current form seems abrupt and out of left field. Right now, BioShock feels like a misguided Star Wars game where only good Jedi can get a lightsaber and dark Jedi are Sith out of luck.
The larger question I'm raising here is this: should a videogame game's morality be primarily expressed intrinsically (i.e. through gameplay and game systems) or extrinsically (i.e. through dialogue and cutscenes)? I think that games are at their most powerful when they express themselves intrinsically, through the fabric of their gameplay, along with the careful use of extrinsic elements as reinforcement and punctuation. The best example of this in BioShock comes in its latter stages, when I had to go through the step-by-step process of turning myself into a Big Daddy so that I could summon a Little Sister to open the series of doors that would take me to the climactic confrontation with Fontaine. So instead of killing Big Daddies in order to harvest Little Sisters for Adam, I was now a Big Daddy defending Little Sisters from waves of Splicers in order to reach my goal.
I don't know about you, but I found myself getting angry at the Splicers who were attacking my ward. It was likely the emotional substitution of my gamer's frustration at my progress being thwarted for my character's rage at the Splicers, but it was no less effective because of it. I lost six Little Sisters before I reached the end of that section, and I got madder and madder as each one was killed, far more so than I would have been had it just been me who'd been killed, akin to how I reacted to the section of God of War when I had to protect my/Kratos' family from an army of my doppelgangers. Would it be overstating the case for me to say, as Tenenbaum did, that these children I brutalized had awoken something inside me...my maternal instinct? All I know is that during that sequence my gamer values and moral values were now perfectly aligned, that my self-interest and my human interest were as one, and that for a relentless harvester like myself, this 180 degree reversal from predator to protector was genuinely moving. (On second thought, perhaps I did have the more complete experience after all...but I'm still rather salty.)
By expressing a videogame's morality in primarily intrinsic terms, developers run the risk of their game being amoral rather than moral because, as I said in my first installment, gamers may focus on playing the elements of system rather than allowing themselves to moved, provoked or challenged by the elements of the narrative. Yet I can't help but feel that game systems--particularly sandbox or emergent systems like those in BioShock--are at their best when they allow players to explore moral choices and their consequences, rather than privileging one moral choice over another, as the makers of this game seem to have done in their handling of the Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid.
As I stated in my first post, I don't mind being "punished" extrinsically--i.e. made to feel bad--for a choice that I've made in a game; in fact, I rather like it. And I respect 2K Bostralia for imposing a meaningful consequence for my choice to harvest the Little Sisters. But when the ultimate consequence is as asymmetrical and binary as Rescue Little Sisters--->Get Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid, Harvest Little Sisters--->Don't Get Hypnotize Big Daddy Plasmid--with other aspects of the ecosystem that could have been hacked, like the Splicer AI, left unexplored--not only do I have a problem with that kind of intrinsic punishment, it also feels like a missed opportunity.
Speaking of missed opportunities, another criticism I'd make of is BioShock that while it gave me a great deal of moment to moment choice and freedom, the only high level choice it offered me was whether to harvest or rescue the Little Sisters. That's understandable, because for a developer to create a proliferating series of choices that truly pay off is often prohibitive. But there was a perfect place in the game for a terrific choice or set of choices to happen: after the player kills Ryan. "A man chooses, a slave obeys," the game has just told us through Andrew Ryan's mid-martyrdom mantra2. Yet from that moment forward, BioShock still gives us just one path to follow: hunt down and kill Fontaine. We don't have a choice. We're given no alternatives. How can we become men when the game continues to enslave us? In other words, BioShock's structure betrays its theme at a critical juncture, and while there are still high points to come, it never quite recovers sufficiently to properly fulfill the promise of its late-game revelation.
2K Bostralia disguises this lack of choice by presenting the game's final act as a fight for self-determination (free yourself from Fontaine's control) and survival (if you don't kill Fontaine, he'll kill you.) But what if, after Ryan's death, we had instead been presented with a reprise of the angel-on-one-shoulder, devil-on-the-other moment from earlier in the game? Only now, rather than deciding whether to rescue or harvest that first Little Sister, we were given the choice between siding with Tenenbaum or Fontaine? Side with Tenenbaum, and the game plays out largely as it does now. Side with Fontaine, and the game culminates with you leading an assault on the creche/orphanage where Tenenbaum keeps the rescued Little Sisters. (There could even be a final choice--just as with Sander Cohen, whom you can either kill or allow to live after completing Fort Frolic--where you could remain loyal to the last Rapture leader standing or betray them to claim Rapture for yourself.)
As I've outlined it, this high-level choice would take place late enough that it would have kept the amount of extra content--levels, voice over, cutscenes, encounters--to a manageable size, compared to making a choice like this earlier in the game. It would have been in keeping with both our earlier high-level decision crossroads and the let-the-gamer-choose-the-time-and-place Big Daddy boss battles, but it would have been much more meaningful given all the time we've spent in the interim absorbing the tragic history of Rapture and experiencing its aftermath. It would have paid off the theme of choice and consequence much better. Finally, for those of us who'd been walking on the dark side it would have properly paved the way for the bad ending.
What it would not have done, however, is improved the final boss battle. I'm running rather long here--surprise, surprise--so I'll save my critique of this for next time. But which game do you think handles boss fights better: BioShock or Metroid Prime 3? Also, how can Metroid Prime 3 honestly claim to have "The Best First-Person Controls Ever Made!" when it's struggling to give us the same functionality on the Wiimote that we had on the Gamecube controller? Push down on the D-pad to fire missiles? Press the minus button to switch visors? Press the plus button to enter Hypermode? Please. Don't you think that BioShock--in what may in fact be its greatest achievement--lets us manage significantly more complexity in a far more intuitive manner?
The morph ball is in your court.
Cheers,
N'Gai
- Having checked out some Big Daddy fights on YouTube, I felt that 2K Bostralia should have made them even cooler to watch--think T-800 vs. T-1000 at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day--since the player is more spectator than participant during these battles. A handful of special case combat animations for all of the A.I. on A.I. confrontations would have added a lot of bang for 2K's buck, no?
- Another missed opportunity occurred when 2K Bostralia made the killing of Andrew Ryan a non-interactive cutscene. I think it should have been semi-interactive, where pushing the left analog stick in any direction only moves you closer to Ryan, and pressing any button strikes Ryan with the golf club, as if your neurons aren't firing properly. The outcome would remain the same, but the player would feel both more helpless and more complicit, as his or her every action is converted into an attack on the defenseless Ryan. Agree or disagree?
Next: More on BioShock's "morality"--and the best boss fight of all time. But first, we bring you Vs. Mode Gaiden.
***
In the span of time during which Level Up and MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo conducted our Vs. Mode debate of BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (which is also being posted on Totilo's blog MTV News: Multiplayer), we occasionally instant messaged each other to discuss some of the finer points of both titles. Two of those IM exchanges were interesting enough that we decided to present them to our readers as sidebars to the main event--hence the title Vs. Mode Gaiden. In today's installment, the Level Up staff's slow progress through Metroid Prime 3: Corruption prompts a discussion of the challenge of navigating Metroid Prime 3's 3-D environments--and its 3-D map.
Totilo: Full disclosure: backtracking is back!!!!!!!!
Croal: But will I ever track my way to the backtracking?
Totilo: I doubt it. I'm skeptical that you're going to get very far. When you get a chance, let me know where you're stuck
Croal: I'm stuck on the morph ball path on that same planet. Time keeps expiring before I can get to the end.
Croal: http://www.destructoid.com/big-daddy-day-care-provides-nothing-but-tlc-for-your-little-girls-40745.phtml
Croal: I've been playing lots of Jeanne d'Arc!
Totilo: At least you have your priorities in order
Croal: 2-D design > 3-D design
Totilo: Survey says: wrong!
Totilo: Or are Ken Levine and Retro both just bad at designing levels?
Croal: 2-D map design > 3-D map design. Seriously though, this goes back to what I said in our short-session games Vs. Mode. Anytime an FPS is not predicated on forward movement, it runs the risk of confusing the player.
Totilo: Sure, but thank god this game isn't all about forward movement. Otherwise it wouldn't be Metroid. Guess that's just the price to pay for having it in 3-D...that it will lose some people
Croal: Agreed. Again, I'm not opposed to backtracking, but I generally don't like it in 3-D games, particularly first-person ones. 2-D Metroid, no problem. 3-D Metroid, problem. That's why I stopped playing the first Metroid prime--I got stuck on a map looking for something, kept getting turned around, and decided that life was too short. An optional onscreen 2-D map, like Diablo-type games have, would gone a long way
Totilo: But sometimes rooms overlap. I don't see how you do it in 2-D. You'd be better off with an option to turn on a directional arrow, the likes of which is in BioShock. After all, the two spots you got stuck had less to do with backtracking than with being disoriented and not being comfortable enough with the map to sort out where you really needed to be heading
Totilo: (feel free to save this exchange...we can throw it in as a bonus)
Croal: Will do—Vs. Mode Gaiden! An arrow would be very un-Metroid—it is a detective story, after all. As for rooms that "overlap" I assume that you mean different above and below each other, but BioShock showed one way of dealing with that, and there are others. I'll try to use the map more, but the map itself is disorienting, which doesn't make me want to use it. So I've been muddling along, trying to rely on forward movement, and I ran into an area that would only have been avoidable by looking at the map or guesswork. I wonder how people responded to this in their focus groups.
Totilo: maybe they were more like me and had no problems using the map! Clearly you are not man enough to wear Samus Aran's visor
Croal: I suppose that's possible. However, if you read Wired's story on Halo 3 and the usability testing Microsoft does, I have a hard time believing that no one else had this issue, or that no-one had a problem using the map. We don't use 3-D maps in real life, so why would gamers be familiar with 3-D maps unless they were recruiting their focus testers among Metroid Prime veterans? Even manipulating the map is confusing, as you yourself admitted.
Totilo: It can be confusing, because, ideally, that 3-D map would be a hologram floating in my living room, not a flat display on my TV. I've found that unlike other game maps, I really need to dwell on it when I pull it up. I zoom in and out with the remote's plus and minus buttons to understand where I'm located (zooming in can clear out a lot of clutter; zooming out can help me get a general sense of where my destination is). I seldom tilt the map up and down--that's when it can get confusing. But I do swivel it left and right. Perhaps what's really missing in the game is a forced tutorial for using the map. They do just assume you know how to use it. Maybe there should be a picture of me on every Prime 3 box with an arrow pointing to me and a word balloon that says: "To play this game, you need to be as good a gamer as this guy."
Croal: We'll see who gets the arrow and word balloon with Metroid Dread. True-school Metroid FTW!
Totilo: And....that's a wrap. Cool. Let's plug this at the start of round 2
Totilo: Metroid dread-locks?
Croal: I know you want them--but you can't have them! There will be no betting on this predator's hair!
***
BioShock, from 2K Boston/Australia and 2K Games
In Round 2 of our Vs. Mode exchange on Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, which is also being posted on Totilo's blog MTV News: Multiplayer, Totilo explained why he finds Metroid more thrilling than BioShock: its well-paced approach to gradually empowering his character. For our part, we pouted over BioShock's almost-but-not-quite-subtle favoring of Little Sister Rescuers like Totilo over Little Sister Harvesters like ourselves (oh, the inhumanity!) and questioned why the game, despite its stated theme of servitude vs. free will, failed to give us a meaningful choice following the game's, uh, shocking revelation.
In today's installment, Totilo pokes fun at our temper tantrum before pointing out how BioShock's morality system could have gone much further, then swerves into an insightful discussion of how both games handle bosses. We similarly took a page from Totilo's book and seized the opportunity to play backseat game designer for a day, offering wholly unsolicited suggestions about how BioShock's moral choices could have been more firmly embedded in the game's DNA. And last but not least, we finally confessed our love-hate relationship with the entire concept of the Metroid Prime series as a 3-D first-person game. Of course, it goes without saying that this exchange is filled with spoilers. Caveat lector.
***
To: N'Gai Croal
Fr: Stephen Totilo
Date: September 15, 2007
Re: Why Is It So Easy To Be So Good?
N'Gai,
Complain. Complain. Complain. Oh, you didn't get your extra plasmid in BioShock because you chose to harvest Little Sisters. Boo-hoo. I bet you'll be even sadder when I point out that the game gives rescuers of Little Sisters three unique Gene Tonics (Armored Shell 2, Prolific Inventor and Safecracker, according to GameFAQs). That's what you--don't--get, you lousy Little-Sister-killer. Serves you right. And, yeah, you did miss out on the game's best Plasmid, the Hypnotize Big Daddy one. It's your own fault. And yet you try to blame the consequences of your actions on the makers of the game. Have you no shame?
Seriously, I understand your frustration. Your analysis of how the game shortchanged you was really interesting. It was also novel. The chief complaint I've had about how games handle morality is that they almost always make moral choices a matter of symmetry. The first Knights of the Old Republic game offered me equal chances to be good or bad. Each Jedi path would arm me with a distinct, but balanced arsenals of Jedi powers. The plot repeatedly bottle-necked in a way that ensured players of either of the game's moral extremes would see the same amount of content. Fable did stuff like this too, as did the second Deus Ex (I didn't play the first one, so I can't speak to it). But with BioShock your complaint targeted the game's asymmetry. You objected to how it betrayed your understanding of how games work and didn't offer your Sister-killing methods with rewards that were as rich as the ones I got for saving the Sisters. I say "Bravo!" to 2K Boston/Australia/Irrational for their imbalanced design. It's easy for me to say, right? I took the more lucrative path. Sure, but let me push this further...
If there's something wrong with the imbalance of the morality system in BioShock it's that it doesn't go far enough. The medium can have its Fable games where your ethical decisions become the clothes that you wear, an outfit that can be changed mid-game by donating some coins to a church of the rival ethical strain. I don't want all that balance. Instead, if a game is going to offer distinct moral paths, then I'd like it to really make those paths distinct--and not equivalent. N'Gai, you suggested, quite rationally, that BioShock should have offered a unique Plasmid, possibly a Hypnotize Splicer ability, to a player following the path you chose. That would have made things equal. There would have been one unique Plasmid for people taking my approach; one for yours. It would have made the moral choices equal. It would have made the decision to kill or save Little Sisters strictly a matter of tactics. Do I want these beasts on my side or these monsters? Do I want Light Jedi powers or Dark? Do I want to hypnotize those guys or those others? The gameplay in each path would be slightly different, but the experiences would be essentially equivalent, balanced, equally rewarded and rewarding.
But look what we've got instead in BioShock: a bias against players who take a certain moral path. We've got a system that offers players a choice that is implied to offer equal bounty (immediate guaranteed rewards or delayed vs. slightly delayed rewards from Tenenbaum). We've got a system that presents itself as fair and balanced but then betrays the player who, according to the game design, chose poorly. Your choice didn't prevent you from clearing the game, but it made clearing the game more difficult. You were penalized. But were you penalized in a truly interesting way? Imagine if the game had kept even more Plasmids from you, say anything but the core three of Electrobolt, Incinerate, and Telekinesis. Imagine if 2KBos.-Aus.-Irr. made the game even more difficult for you to complete because of what you had done. Would you have felt robbed? Deceived and suckered into picking from a seemingly balanced choice only to find the rest of the game so severely imbalanced? What if the game warned you, repeatedly during, say, the first three Little Sister encounters that you were on the verge of such a penalty? We'd be left with the same message BioShock already sends: saving the Little Sisters is the right thing to do. But we'd also have a game that makes the player who chooses the "wrong" path aware of their wrong-doing while playing the game, instead of only once they've swapped notes with their favorite games writer from MTV News, fact-checked with a game guide and stamped their feet. Are you with me? Let's radicalize morality systems by turning them into something else: difficulty settings. Want to take the scumbag, Sister-killing approach to get through a game? Well, guess what, buddy? It's going to be harder to win the game. You're going to be given access to fewer tools and abilities. Or...shocker...maybe taking the right path would make the game harder.
As the game is currently designed, I have no reason to go back and play BioShock the way you played it. I'd be playing at only a mild handicap, minus a single Plasmid. If the game had been made your way, with an extra Little-Sister-killer-exclusive Plasmid, I still wouldn't be that compelled. But if playing the game over as a Sister-killer like you meant that I'd be made to feel like the entire game world--and much of the gameplay system--was against me, that every fight was a struggle, that the few abilities and weapons I acquired were being provided by a disapproving, stingy, reluctant game designer disappointed with my immoral choice, well, that...that'd be really interesting.
The only thing I've experienced in games that resembles this is the pure stealth option in games such as Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. Such games can be conquered by patient gamers in almost entirely non-lethal ways. That path is hard. The problem, for me, is that it's also not as fun as going through the game with a little bit of stealth and a good amount of lethal, gadget-supported combat. For the thing I'm calling for to be fun, either path would have to be fun--equally fun, if not equally difficult or equally empowered.
By the way, isn't it somewhat perverse that you and I conclude that BioShock champions the way I played simply because my method reaped quantifiably greater rewards?
On to other things...You've got me chattering about game morality for so long I nearly forgot to commend you for trying to start a beef between me and Jonathan Blow. That was smooth. In my last letter I sad that "the thing that I think video games do best [is] gradually empower the player" and you cited Blow's GameSetWatch critique of those who celebrate games as empowerment fantasies. Blow had said: "Is it really good to be the pretend 'most powerful person in the world,' and is that where the medium ought to be heading, really?"
Let's circle back. The word "gradually" in my line is a clue as to why you can't really start beef here. As I went on to explain in my last letter, the empowerment that games so capably provide--and that captivates me--occurs, over time, within games. I appreciate Blow's concern about celebrating games as some sort of alternate reality chamber that turns a world of real life Clark Kents into virtual Supermen. I, however, am focused on the delight of empowerment within a game, which is sometimes called "getting better at something" and sometimes called "getting more abilities." Some games, like Blow's Braid don't dole out the empowerment or make it purchasable, a la Metroid or BioShock, but strict level design alone and an ascending difficulty curve grant the Braid player a gradual feeling of mastery. So does Tetris, which enables the player who plays their 100th session to become increasingly skilled at placing pieces at high speeds. So, more crudely, more obviously, and, for whatever reason, more to my tastes, does Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. That game made me feel like a wimp when I first stepped into its poisonous Dark Ether realm and saw my health diminish simply for virtually breathing its air. It made me feel bulletproof when I returned there late in the game armed with an Annihilator Beam and the Light Suit. Hooray for in-game empowerment, even if would be nice to see some challenges to that dynamic. But, hey, isn't one of the primary appeals of Spore the appeal of pulling a little single cell creature up from the ooze and atop the inter-galactic food chain?
Speaking of empowerment, one of the key abilities you gain early in Metroid Prime 3 is Hyper Mode. With the easily reachable press of the plus button, this allows the player to switch into a super-charged mode that displays the game world in black and white and multiplies the power of their weapon. The Hyper Mode boost is temporary. It is either exhausted after the player fires a few well-placed shots or it turns toxic, forcing the player to rapidly fire in any direction to expel the Hyper energy, lest the toxicity kill game's heroine Samus. This mechanic may well be a first for Nintendo games, which traditionally have allowed players to get a boost without worrying that such boost--a Fire Flower, a Donkey Kong hammer, a Master Sword--has a drawback. The Hyper Mode power comes with a price: potentially fatal overdose. (So maybe that's why Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto had a cool reaction to the FPS overdose game Haze at this year's E3.) I like the system. It adds a new strategic twist to Metroid Prime combat. Given how much we've been discussing game morality, I think you could also view it as a very light addition of moral gravity to the Metroid universe. It's a mild maturation of the common video game idea that every new pick-up is an instrument for good and that every new trick should be played without fear of consequence. It makes me think of my second-least favorite aspect of BioShock: the scene in the beginning of the game when the player-hero comes upon his first Plasmid updgrade. He spots a syringe sparkling with power and unquestioningly stabs it into his arm... and then gets a great power. Only in video games, people. N'Gai, what do you think? Do you want video games to have more double-edged swords?
I just mentioned my runner-up for Least Favorite BioShock Moment. Anyone who has completed the game can probably guess my winner. It's the game's final boss. Since we've spoiled just about everything else in the game during this Vs. Mode I'm going to do ONE MORE SPOILER now...
...and mention that the last thing you fight in the game is a Chewbacca-sized Fontaine. He looks, acts and talks like a super-villain. He's a stereotypical, megalomaniac of a game-ending boss. He attacks in patterns. To beat him, you duck and cover. You might as well be fighting the villain at the end of an X-Men game. There's little connection in tone, theme or even gameplay to what BioShock established before it. It's as if 2KB-A-I ran out of ideas just a little too soon. Not that this didn't cut into the game's many perfect scores. All's well even if it doesn't end well, apparently.
You asked me what I thought of the boss encounters in BioShock and Prime 3. If we consider Big Daddys as bosses, I like BioShock's better. I enjoy the novelty of stumbling upon such formidable enemies in surprising locations. Prime 3, like most games, telegraphs the appearance of a boss. You can tell when you're about to fight one, when you've entered a room where one is about to emerge. In BioShock, the opportunities come as surprises. BioShock's other bosses are less interesting. They fit the mold of many game bosses. They are enemies that are arbitrarily granted more power than others, a character programmed to survive a headshot or 20 bullets to the abdomen, because, well, he's a boss and won't die as easily as a random grunt. There may be some narrative rationale to them, but why, really, should the mad doctor be more resilient to bullets than his lieutenants? Because he'd the mad doctor? The fiction buckles to accommodate a game design cliché. The bosses in Prime 3, however, represent inspired convergence points in the two main avenues of the series' gameplay. They require the player to utilize both the offensive skills learned in combat with earlier enemies and the detective skills honed while exploring the game worlds' terrain. You don't just shoot these Bosses. You scan for a weak point, grapple and yank away armor plating, roll into a ball to bomb a guarded node, freeze puddles of fuel to make them lose their footing, etc. From a gameplay perspective, the Prime 3 bosses make sense. From a gameplay perspective, the non-Big Daddy BioShock bosses don't.
You also asked me about the Metroid Wii controls. I think the box hype claiming these to be the best first-person controls has some merit. The shooting aspect of the controls worked perfectly for me, and mapping character navigation to the nunchuck's thumbstick was a solid choice. The simple fact that these controls remove the question of whether to invert the Y-axis proves that they are a step in the right direction. Whether they expose limitations in the Wii remote's button layout is another sto
