A Return to Form: The Cyclical Nature of Gaming

People often say that culture is cyclical, meaning that what was popular a number of years ago comes back around as time goes on. I didn’t start to notice this until somewhat recently, but then again I’ve not been around long enough to really see this cycle complete one full rotation. One of the few areas that I’ve invested any amount of time to learn the history of is gaming, so maybe that’s why it’s place where I’m seeing this phenomenon first. Gaming, in the modern sense, has only been around since 1972 and most gamers today probably don’t really start counting until the NES exploded onto the scene in 1985. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to see the old styles coming back around the bend.

SIT ON UNCLE MAGNUS'S KNEE AND HE'LL TELL YOU ALL ABOUT WHEN WE HAD TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES WITH A FUCKING DIAL INSTEAD OF BUTTONS.

Nowhere is this trend clearer than in the First Person Shooter Genre. As of the past three years, we’ve seen a return to the old fashioned run-and-gun style that made the genre was it is today. Moreover, the same titles that fashioned the genre are the ones taking us on a trip down memory lane: titles like DOOM and Wolfenstein.

Doom, as I’ve said before, damn near invented the FPS as we know it. Doom was so popular and influential that the whole FPS genre didn’t undergo any real change until Half-Life, five years later. DOOM (2016) takes what we thought a shooter was supposed to be and blows its head off. When your character is confronted with the usual narrative exposition dump, he pushes the monitor away in disgust; he’s got things to rip’n’tear. Gone are the pretentions to realism and regenerating health; your character gets ammo from destroying monsters in gruesome horrific ways and health kits are instantly applied as your character walks over them. 

Yes, this is how DOOM should look: Bloody, insane, and fun.

Wolfenstein: The New Order combines the old fashioned shooty gameplay with more modern touches, like some semblance of a story. While it returns to its roots, Wolfenstein: TNO also takes time to deconstruct the very tropes that it created. Yes, you play as William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz, but instead of glorifying in his bloody rampages through Nazis, you take time to reflect on how tired and broken he is; you see what makes him strong and what makes him silent. The merge of new and old gives players poignant story moments and adrenaline filled missions, the best of both worlds, really.

It's rare that we get to see a hero look vulnerable in games; most are too obsessed with the typical male power fantasy to chance it.

This is not to say that the renaissance of early 90’s style is limited to the FPS of the world. RPGs are heading back to their roots as well. The classic RPG is sprawling and mysterious, like The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall or Fallout and though the graphics have certainly gotten a facelift, games like Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2 aim to bring back that unforgiving magic many gamers grew up on.

Divinity: Original Sin, released in 2014, saw all of the hand holding that modern RPGs do and decided that, no thank you, it would rather chop off its own leg than leave you a map to their next objective. The kind of game where you can build a useless character and not realize it until halfway through the main story, it will vomit mountains of text at you and expect you to remember the details. Divinity: Original Sin cleverly stops short of the truly classic RPG chore of taking actual notes as you play, but it’s a near thing. Combat is turned based and based on action points and there’s enough side quests for you to faff about forever. If you’re looking to get truly lost in an RPG world, you no longer have to play a game with graphics like the stuff you scrape off your boots.

Pretty graphics and action points!? Where do I sign?

Wasteland 2 had one hell of gestation process. The original Fallout, a spiritual successor to the original Wasteland, was arguably intended to be Wasteland 2, but we had to wait 26 years for a true sequel. Wasteland picks up where the original left off, dumping you off at the ass end of nowhere. Comparing Wasteland 2’s atomic desert to Fallout’s is like comparing a gecko to a komodo dragon. If you hope to journey around the desert alone, better think again. Every door is trapped, every room is full of enemies, and I don’t think you’re too hot at disarming traps or lockpicking, are you buddy? You need to bring along a group of friends, but don’t feel bad if one or two of them bite the dust out there. A huge number of recruit-able characters can round out your squad. When you don’t have to give all your characters voiced lines, the possibilities are endless.

Ah yes, friendly locals! Surely this exchange will end in amicable tea parties and not one party looting the other's corpses.

I don’t know how long this nostalgia ride will go on, but I’m happy to ride it until it runs out of gas. Old games certainly aren’t perfect, and modern games have brought a huge amount of progress to the fore, not just in terms of visuals, but with new mechanics and design choices. Sometimes though, you miss a main character that moves at 40 MPH and guns that clear a room without reloading, or sorting through an in-game journal to figure out where you should be going. I’ll just hold out for a classic-RPG inspired Elder Scrolls sequel here in the corner.

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Vanilla’s good, sure, but have you tried it with sprinkles? : Modding and Games

You can spend ten thousand hours working on a painting and the minute you show it to somebody, you’ll get a comment about how to improve it. Nobody is 100% happy with anything and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. We certainly wouldn’t have mods without that little bit of “Hmmm, it needs something else…” Mods, for those who aren’t familiar, are user created changes to a game. Maybe you think that a weapon is overpowered, or that a questline should have different objectives, so you go into the games files and bam, you’ve got a different weapon or quest.

I mean yeah, your brushstrokes are good. But what about the palette? Also, this would be better with aliens.

But what do mods do for a game? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?

When talking about mods, you’ve got to mention Doom. While not the first game to have mods, the Doom developers made it incredibly easy to modify the game, resulting in a flurry of creative activity. All of Doom’s data was packaged in files called WADs, or Where’s All the Data, making it possible to make whole new levels, weapons, and storylines.

Doom is one of the most important games in history, and the start of the first person shooter as we know it.

The advent and expansion of the internet made it easier and easier to distribute and download mods, expanding the scene further. Doom also showcases one of the key benefits of mods; extending the shelf-life of a game. Doom was released in 1993, but people are still refining, ideating, and creating new mods for the father of the modern FPS. Brutal Doom, released in 2012 and updated at the end of 2015, is one such mod. It’s a total conversion of Doom, meaning that the authors of this mod created entirely new levels, changed up the weapons,

They somehow made it bloodier. Don't even ask me how. I have no idea. They also added reloading, more melee attacks, and a whole slew of other content.

tweaked the mechanics, and came out with a whole new Doom. While not all modders are ambitious as those who created Brutal Doom, you can see how providing tools to your users can extend the life of your game far beyond the paltry 1-2 years that most games are active for.

Of course, you don’t have to look 20 years back to see how important mods are; you need only look back to last year’s Boston based adventure, Fallout 4. Bethesda, Fallout 4’s developer, has a habit of releasing modding tools to users fairly soon after the games have come out, going as far back as The Construction Kit which shipped with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

A bit dull looking, maybe, but you can change up the whole game however you like. There's power in these here boring windows.

It’s no surprise that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have now become synonymous with mods, but the way that association is viewed might surprise you. While the mods are generally viewed in a positive light, there are those who feel that Bethesda are viewing the modding scene almost like they would view beta testers. By “relying” on the modding scene to fix common issues with their games, you could argue that Bethesda is pushing their work off onto their consumers. You just need to look at the top mods on any Fallout 4 modding site to see some form of the phrase “Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch.” Part of this is definitely due to the scope of Bethesda’s games, but it’s hard to imagine that the phrase, “the modders will fix it” is never uttered in the Bethesda office.

Over 145,000 downloads as of time of writing. 4th most endorsed file on NexusMods, the largest non-Bethesda download site.

Even Fallout 4’s settlement system seems like something that modders would have implemented themselves at some point, though not at the scale that Bethesda did. Mods are great, but the perception that you’re relying on modders to fix your game is not.

There is one area where mods are not so welcome; multiplayer. Any sort of multiplayer game requires balancing, an incredibly time consuming and mercurial process to ensure that there’s more than one way to play. Mods are the antithesis of this, being changes that users create to satisfy a personal want. Maybe you think StarCraft’s Zerg are overpowered, but if you were to be able to mod the game to make them less so, and then play online, any Zerg player would have an immediate disadvantage.

Not to say that the Zerg couldn't just a little nerfing. Zerg rushes aren't fun for anybody. Or maybe they are, at least for the rusher.

There are other concerns around how your product is experienced as well. A recent example of the clash between mods and multiplayer is the forced shutdown of the legacy (meaning unaltered and unexpanded) World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius. Nostalrius was the largest WoW legacy server available until its April 2016 shutdown, with 800,000 registered users. It was not an issue of theft, like if the Nostalrius devs were charging for the use of the server, but more of an issue of branding. Games like WoW rely on expansions to keep people subscribed, to get new subscribers in the ecosystem, and to create a unified experience for all the players. WoW devs do have legal and arguably reasonable reasons for shutting down the server, though it did anger a lot of people. Because multiplayer games are never quite “finished” and because the experience is shared there’s not really any room for personal touches. Think what you will about that, but I don’t think it’ll be changing anytime soon.

Mods can extend the lifespan of a game, fix issues that the original developers missed, and create a stronger relationship between studios and gamers. They can also ruin the balance of a multiplayer game, dilute the vision of a particular project, and create more work for the dev team (got to build those tools out after all). It’s up to each individual developer whether to include modding support in their games, but it’s worth noting that the sales of any modable game are going to continue long after their non-modable counterparts.

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Pace Yourself now

Some players think about pace a lot less than game designers do, which is a shame because pace can lie at the root of why players might appreciate their favorite games. Before we start, a quick definition of pace in video games, for those of you that aren’t familiar: Pace is the speed at which you move through a game. Pace can be how fast you move through levels, how fast the game shuttles you through the story, or even the speed of the combat.

But what is good pacing? How does pace improve a game?

You might think that action games need to have a constant ramp up as far as pace goes, and many do. However, some might argue that the best action games understand the importance of a little down time. Quiet moments give you a chance to explore the world that you’re in and understand what the characters are going through. 

Wolfenstein: The New Order did a great job with the little moments. In between bombastic combat sections where you literally fight moon-Nazis, you head back to your home base. Usually, you have a little quest to find some tools, or just explore for a few minutes.

Yes, literal moon nazis. Bet you thought I was joking.

Each time you go back, things change a little. Maybe a room once empty now holds a rescued resistance fighter, or maybe a civilian’s room is now empty. You’re never removed from the harsh realities of a Nazi dominated future. You can talk to the other characters and really get a sense of why you’re fighting, ensuring that the combat never gets too ridiculous or boring because it means something.

Wolfenstein: The New Order focused on environmental storytelling in the quiet moments, to its benefit.

Half Life 2 also understood how much a quiet moment here and there can mean. The opening plays much differently than the rest of the game, adding flavor and context with observation. You walk through a train station in City 17, meeting civilians and civil protection agents. You understand the oppression that the citizens of City 17 labor under, and you can get angry on their behalf. You can see how terrible this world is and how many of the people have lost hope. Most importantly, you’re given time to digest these feelings and the world. When you actually get to fighting, you have a reason beyond “oh hey this is fun.”

"Pick up that can, citizen." That simple line tells you so much about how people are treated in this new world.

Level design also has a huge amount to do with pace. If a level requires you to backtrack 500 times, it feels tiring or annoying. Conversely, if a level is just a straight line, it can feel a little too simple.

Shovel Knight is a game that excels at clever level design. The whole game is a callback to NES era platformers, from the look, to the gameplay, to the sound of the game. Much like those earlier platformers, the game has an overworld where you choose which level you want to play. Each level is uniquely designed with its own set of challenges, enemies, and treasures. Not only that, but each level’s pace plays into the challenges you face. Mole Knight’s stage, for instance, is filled with lava that you can “goo-ify” to bounce on.

Bounce, Shovel Knight. Bounce to your doom.

You spend most of your time in this stage hanging in the air, and the enemies are designed to knock you slightly off course as you fall, or be where you're going to land. The pace of this level is fairly slow compared to some of the other levels, but it never feels tedious.  You feel like you’re really improving as a player because you learn to deal with everything the game throws at you, despite the differing feelings of all of it.

Shovel Knight captures the Super Mario Bros. 3 style, where each level has it's own unique challenge and speed.

Does pace have to change from level to level, or do you need different levels to make an engaging game? Doom, a breakneck ride from start to finish, might have something to say about that. You’re dropped into a space station on mars with a pistol and you carve your way through hellspawn (and that’s all the story you’re getting).

John Carmack, Doom's lead programmer, once said, "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

Doom is a game of reflexes, frantic movement, and keeping a cool head. The pace of Doom never really dips, it just sort of increases as you have the chance to use more intense weapons. Each level has a “par” time, usually under 5 minutes. The fast pace forces you to rely more on instinct rather than planning and the weapons and enemies are designed around this. Most enemies fire slow moving projectiles or need to use melee attacks. Many of your weapons follow similar rules, so you have to move around enemy fire and you strafe, jump, and run around pillars to return fire without eating too many fireballs to the face. A slow space marine is a dead space marine, according to Doom.

Doom is full of traps for the unwary player, but with quick feet and a quick trigger finger, you'll make it out.

So, we’ve seen how pace can be changed up to great effect, how levels can be paced to keep the game feeling fresh, and how a constant pace can tell you how the game is meant to be played. Pace tells us a lot about how the game designers thought about progression, atmosphere, and playstyle. Think about your favorite game. How was it paced? Where was that pace the most obvious? Why did the pace fit?