It’s all in the Details: How Little Things make a game Better

There’s a saying that goes, “God is in the details.” There’s another that says “The Devil is in the details.” Theologically confusing? Yes, but it does tell us about how important details are. Details add color and richness to experiences that you can’t get if you’re just looking at the whole thing. Games are no different in this regard. Details keep you involved in a game’s story, it’s world, or its characters.

Each of these shops is a little bit of detail that made the world a little richer, if confusing. Who do these shopkeepers sell to?

How do small details enrich a world? What are some good examples?

Mass Effect 3 is the epic end to a space opera that took our Commander Shepard from a special ops soldier to the hero of the Galaxy. You meet companions, fight enemies, and even find love along the way. In such a large series of games, one might assume that the little things would be left out.

Mass Effect 3 is the story of a person very in love with shooting things and chest high walls.

After all, who the hell has time to figure out why the spaceships still make noise in space? Mass Effect 3's writers, that's who.  In a scene with your dropship pilot, Steve Cortez, on the Citadel, Steve relates you to how he comes to the viewing port to relax. He has a line, “When I was alone, I'd turn off the auditory emulators and just watch them drift by silence.” The ships in Mass Effect 3 don't make pew-pew noises, you just thought they do because of the emulators!

in fact, because they have sound in space, they can take it away at crucial moments like in Mass Effect 2 when your ship is destroyed and you walk through it's hull.

The writers know that people expect to hear something when they see something on screen, even if real life physics would disagree. With one little line, the universe of Mass Effect becomes that much more concrete, unrealistic expectations of sounds in space and all. It's nice to know that not everything will change when we figure out how to punch holes in the fabric of reality.

Also a strong entry into the "generic white guy holding a gun" poster contest.

Alone in the Dark (2008) is not a particularly well made game, small details or otherwise. The story is meandering, most of gameplay is dull and repetitive, and the numerous set pieces wear out their welcome quickly. Alone was not without it's good qualities, however. The fire in the game behaved so realistically that it was shocking at the time, and the melee combat was more visceral than anything most triple AAA games feature.

The moment it really shined for me, however, involves one of the most common tropes in gaming: a locked wooden door. In most games, you'd have to go find a key, or find some way around.  Alone in the Dark threw me for a loop. When I swung my axe at the door, I busted a piece of the door right into the next room. I stared, totally shocked, for about 30 seconds. Then I gleefully hacked out a protagonist sized hole in the door and walked on through.

You swing melee weapons by moving the thumbstick back and then whipping it forward. Awkward? Yes. Better then pressing the mouse? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Most games will tell you you're a super powerful warrior or mage, but when you try to knock down a damn wooden door the whole lie the game built up around you falls apart. Alone in the Dark says, knock yourself out kid. Beat down that stupid door. Maybe even burn it? Shoot the lock out! Be a real person! Reality is funny in games; we want all the good parts without any of the bad parts. Alone in the Dark actually delivered what I would argue is a better version of game reality than most games. Bit of a shame the rest of the game had more technical issues than a giraffe trying to use a fax machine.

The Witcher 3 is full of things to amaze you, big and small. You can lose hours of your life to Gwent or just walking around the countryside. One of my favorite little details is one that many people might not have even found.

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, or "how to make all other open-world RPGs look like yesterday's trash"

Doesn't this guy look trustworthy? What with the drying blood and general look of hate?

On one monster hunting quest you are sent to deal with a Leshen (a kind of forest spirit) that was aggravating a small village. Once you get there, you find the whole village slaughtered. On closer inspection you find a little girl alive, who says that a man with eyes like yours did this. Eventually you find the witcher Gaetan. He took the quest before you and killed the Leshen, but the villagers tried to stiff him on payment. Two of the villagers tried to kill him with a pitchfork when he argued. Enraged and wounded, he slaughtered the whole village. The whole tale is deep and winding, but the best part comes as you approach Gaetan. If you're wearing the School of the Cat witcher armor he will remark “Well well, what have we here? Feline armor, wolf's head medallion- a crossbreed?”

Witcher Schools are notoriously strict in their traditions, so it makes sense that he'd be more than a little amused with your copycat style. In fact, he's one of the few people who would actually know anything about different kinds of witcher gear. His one line makes you think differently about him and consider your options for completing this quest much more carefully. He's not some mindless brute, he has a sense of humor, and he appears to regret what he did. Any way you chose to end the quest, that one line made Gaetan a little more human.

Video games have gone from little pixels on the screen to massive, engaging, sprawling wonders of technology. No matter how long or massive games get, little details are what is going to engage people. Nobody is going to remember the 85th firefight in Halo: Combat Evolved, but they'll always remember Sarge's pep-talk in the first level. God's own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine indeed.

Scale, Size, and Scope: The Mass Effect Series

After a successful game, it always seems that the game designers ask themselves the question: “how do we make it bigger?” As a result, often the sequel ends up jumping the shark – so named for the Happy Days episode where somebody literally jumped over a shark. In other words, the plot nosedived from epic to ridiculous faster than the main character could clear the dorsal fin.  Gaming has generally been the second home for the bombastic action sequence after movies of course, so game designers should really consider this question instead: “how epic is too epic?” The Mass Effect Series had a really good approach to scale and scope.

So, what makes the Mass Effect Series idea of scale different?

Everyone loves epic space adventure. Unless you hate fun. And joy. And puppies.

Mass Effect, the first game in the series, feels small scale, despite the galaxy-wide implications of your mission.  The story starts out with Geth, the reclusive race of machines, attacking a human colony. You, Commander Shepard, expose Saren and his involvement with the Geth, and track him down for the rest of the game. The pacing of Mass Effect makes you feel as if you’re just on Saren’s tail the whole time because you just miss him, or clash with him every time. Since you spend most of your time in a self-contained ship with a clear-cut mission ahead of you, the large number of planets you visit fade into the background. Rather, the story is really about Shepard, and how you choose to develop them as a character.

Your companion loyalty missions are way more interesting than any of the story missions you go on, save the last one. They take you to new planets or areas and really help you understand your companions and how they fit in the game world.

In Mass Effect 2 instead of dealing with an entire army, you are trying to stop a single ship. A huge ship kills off Shepard and destroys your ship in the first five minutes, which is a hell of a memorable start to any adventure. Cerberus, a pro-human terrorist group, brings you back to life to you chase after the Collectors who are abducting human colonists. Turns out, they’re all on the same ship that killed you at the beginning of the game. The Collectors are presented as mysterious, yet one-dimensional, so you spend most of your time building your team. Each member is detailed, has a unique backstory and loyalty mission, and is generally enjoyable to talk to. In fact, most memorable moments of the game don’t revolve around you, but your teammates.

This picture sums up Mass Effect 3 pretty well. Shepard walking away from the total destruction of Earth. It pictures the focus of the game, rather than any companions as in the previous games.

Mass Effect 3 is the appropriately grandiose last hurrah. Within the first ten minutes of starting up the game, you escape Earth as The Reapers annihilate Earth’s armies. You acquire companions, but as The Reapers, as ominous as The Collectors were bland, threaten the entire galaxy, your mission doesn’t focus on your team, but on helping the galaxy prepare for what might be their last stand. Shepard, by this point, practically legend, doesn’t have much character exploration left. Much of the cast from ME1 and ME2 return, though your squad is much smaller. With these familiar faces, you focus more on the places you go and the people around you. It’s a clever subversion of the intense character-introspection of earlier games, but it’s almost expected; this is the final game in an epic trilogy, of course it would be about the spectacle. Yet, it never feels like too much, overblown, and manufactured.

Ending a trilogy like Mass Effect is like difficult, and many might say that it was underwhelming, but I’m not sure if there was a better way to tie everything up. Once you dig into each game, you can see how the designers used scale to make you care about Shepard, your companions, and then the galaxy. Because you care about all three of these aspects of the game, the conclusion feels like the end of a cohesive journey.