There should be a law against games that suck
Seriously. When a developer spends more money and time on hyping the game than they did on actually developing it, they should be fined. Then maybe we’ll stop getting games like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. I played maybe half of it over the past few days, and finally got so disgusted I stuffed it back into the Gamefly envelope. The plot was interesting enough – what would have happened if Winston Churchill did not run England, Germany took over Europe, and then attacked the US? You play as a construction worker who ends up joining a resistance group, being sent on missions to kill various leaders and even blow up the White House. Germany has developed an atomic bomb, and plans to test it on New York, so naturally you have to stop them.
Unfortunately I never got that far. The game ends up being your standard shooter, and has two major flaws. First is the controls – they don’t always work. The game puts up a little icon when you are able to perform certain actions such as opening a door, pushing a button, or melee attacking someone. The problem is that the icon doesn’t always come up when it should. I spent 15 minutes running around a level looking for a way up to the roof, coming back to an elevator and trying again and again to push the button on the wall, only to have no icon come up telling me I was able to do so. Finally after maybe the 10th try the little hand icon comes up and now the button works. This wasn’t one of those “you can’t do that until everyone is dead” level progression blocks, it was just a case of the game not seeing where I was standing. Same thing happens with the melee attack icon – if you approach someone (who is shooting at you, of course) you might get an icon showing that you can take their gun from them and either kill them or use them as a human shield. Half the time this just did not work, mostly because I was too close to the enemy. I’m out of ammo, this guy is shooting at me from maybe a foot away, but I can’t grab his gun because I am too close. Back away to about 2 feet and now the icon comes up, but it’s too late because I am dead. The inconsistency of the “action” icon made me die many times. Seems like the only time it was guaranteed to work was when the enemy was stupidly standing there staring right at you, or when it was possible for an “environmental” kill – pushing the guy off a cliff, smashing his face into a piece of machinery, etc. They wanted so badly for you to see these that the enemy would not notice you if you were jumping up and down while playing the trumpet – his sole purpose was to demonstrate how cool it is to kill him using that rotating saw blade he just happens to be standing near.
The other problem is the lockups. Seems like a lot of games have this problem lately, where you will either get a “dirty disc” error (which I believe is the XBOX version of the Blue Screen of Death), or it will just lock up completely. Either case requires you to go back to a previous point. The checkpoints in Fall of Liberty are so far apart that it’s possible to lose an hour’s worth of work by dying or the game crashing. (Granted, these are games based on a form of Windows, so we should expect crashes I suppose.) I tried no less than 15 times to sprint across a building while being shot at in order to jump into a zeppelin before it takes off. Half an hour later, I finally make it, then the game locked up – naturally before saving off the checkpoint, forcing me to start the level over again. That was enough to make me say “screw this” and send it back.
This kinda thing is just not acceptable on a console game. I’ve beta tested games before. I know that games played on a PC are harder to test because of the millions of hardware combinations out there. It’s not unusual for a game to come out and get a patch three days later because people are having problems with some sound card from 10 years ago that the developers assumed was obsolete and no one would still be using one. We’re talking consoles here, and all consoles are the same! It shouldn’t be that hard to make sure a game works on an XBOX or a PS3 when everyone who has one has the same one! Yet we still have games crashing, locking up, slowing down, etc. As great a game as Oblivion is, its biggest flaw is the game’s cache getting corrupted and crashing the game.
I think as long as game developers accepted and followed the following rules, things would be a LOT better:
1. Cutscenes that repeat every time we have to do a section over again MUST be skippable. If you’re going to make a section so difficult that we have to retry it 20 times, don’t make us watch the same boring cutscene 20 times. Let us skip it with a button press.
2. Keep the controls consistent. There’s no reason to make one button to jump up and grab something, and then use a different button to climb up on top of whatever it is we just grabbed. If you’re going to limit where you can perform certain actions, make sure it actually works when it should. There’s no reason to disallow using a switch on a wall simply because I was standing at a 90 degree angle from it, and you require me to be at an 87 degree angle.
3. There is no excuse for lockups on a console game. None. Don’t release the game and then have the nerve to say a week later ‘we never saw that.” What that says is “we spent all our money on advertising, hookers, and drugs, so we never actually tested the game.” Fall of Liberty locked up 6 times over the course of 15 hours – you can’t tell me that was never caught in testing.
4. The environment should be real, and never get in the way. For example, if an enemy runs between a table and chair, I should also be able to. I should not get stuck running in place because I don’t fit between the table and the chair, and neither one will move. I don’t expect to be able to pick up the table and throw it at someone (although some games do let you do this, and it is sometimes cool) but it’s a TABLE. Let me push it aside so I can keep going! I also don’t want to stumble over a brick or a bottle that happens to be in front of me – in reality I would step over it or kick it aside, but in some games (Dark Messiah) tiny objects are treated as if they are the same size as a chair.
5. The enemy AI needs to be consistent and believable. Every game developer brags about the great strides they have made in artificial intelligence. In some games, the enemies behave the way humans would – they would attack you, and if they are losing they’ll run or call for backup. They are also bound by the same limitations as you – if they run out of ammo, they have to pause to reload. If you’re careful, you can sneak up on them. They can’t automatically see you through a wall or a door simply because you are nearby. They can, however, hear you if you make too much noise. And then there are the games like Fall of Liberty – enemies never run out of ammo. They always know where you are at all times, and can hear you from 30 yards away. Some of them will kneel down in the middle of a hallway and do nothing while you stand there right in front of them. Maybe they will fight back when you start shooting, but occasionally not. I did see one or two of them hide behind a object and blindly shoot over top of it, which was neat, but shooting the gun kills them – oops.
6. Games must have a consistent physics system that is based in that reality. I am not talking about science-fiction games where your character is able to use strength or vision enhancements, or fantasy where you can fly and hurl fireballs at each other. If a game is based on WWII for example, it needs to use physics appropriate for that time period. So if I come to a wooden door, that door needs to behave like a wooden door. I cannot shoot through it with my current weapon, but if I hit it with a grenade or rocket, that door should splinter right off its hinges, and maybe even take some of the wall with it, just like a real wooden door. (Most of the time we’re told they can’t do that due to engine limitations or framerate issues.) Instead, I end up with a door that blocks my bullets, but the enemy behind it can shoot at me through it. They can always see where I am and they don’t have to open the door (nor will they in some cases.) As soon as I open that door, I can now attack them, and once they are dead I find out that they were using the same kinda gun I was. When the computer can do things that you cannot, under the same circumstances, that’s cheating. If I have to reload every 30 shots, so must the computer players equipped with the same gun. If I fire off a rocket and it hits something right in front of me, I expect to die from my own mistake, but when an enemy does the same thing and neither him nor any of his nearby buddies take any damage, that’s cheating. If I am hiding behind a wall to avoid snipers, I should not see laser sights passing through that wall, nor should I take damage from their bullets which can magically pass through that wall when I am not able to shoot back at them through that same wall.
7. Artificial progression barriers are stupid. You’re running through a building looking for something, and come to a door that will not open. You get no feedback from it, it just doesn’t open. So you go on down the hallway, finally do whatever you were told to do, and then are told go back outside. You try to go back the way you came, but the door you used to get in is closed off. You wander around looking for some way out, until you get back to that first door that was closed earlier – and now, inexplicably, it’s open. This is an artificial barrier. There is stuff back there, but the developer of that level didn’t want you to get there yet, so the door was sealed shut, and the only way to open it was to… complete your current objective? Doors do not open because you shot someone. Doors open because you hit a security switch, or found a key or an access card, or hacked a computer. A door opens because you caused so much chaos that enemies come pouring through, and once they are dead you can now use that door. Perhaps you blew something up and knocked a hole in a wall, and now you can use it as an escape route. Same thing applies to other objects, such as machinery. I forget what game it was, but there was a bulldozer sitting in a yard, which I could sit in. There was an obvious starter button on it, but I was not allowed to hit it. Again, no feedback, no message, it just ignored me. So I got down, did something, did something else, now suddenly there are enemies rushing in through a hole in a fence and running in front of a wall. The game now TELLS me to go use the bulldozer to run over them. Scripted events like this are cool, but they need to make sense! Perhaps I couldn’t use that bulldozer because the key was in the foreman’s pocket, so I had to kill the foreman to get the key. The noise caused by doing that attracted others to come rushing at me, so I go use the key to start the bulldozer and run them all over (because they would naturally stand completely still as the bulldozer approaches them at a break-neck speed of 15 mph.). Bulldozers don’t magically become active because I happened to grab the secret blueprints from the foreman’s shed. The world just does not work that way.