Some of you might have seen my feature yesterday at Kotaku on the evolution of the survival horror genre. I discussed a lot of different factors in the feature, but among my assertions was my idea that the reason that combat was poor in early third-person games where environmental interaction played a primary role was due to technological limitations. Firstly, I phrased it a bit poorly -- it was and continues to be a design decision issue, but I made the assumption that the tools designers had at the time played a role. I wrote:Though the inability to directly confront monsters in an effective way ended up enhancing the fear factor for these games, it wasn’t likely an entirely deliberate design decision – technology in the nineties didn’t allow for multiple kinds of mechanics in one game the way we see today.
I got a response to my feature from Microsoft Game Studios' John Tynes, producer with Xbox Live Productions there, who disputes my assertion and explains precisely why I was wrong -- and why, as he says, the point of contention is a "minor point that leads to a major point." I thought his comments were really interesting, so I received his permission to reprint his letter here. Enjoy!
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That’s just not true. There was no technical limitation preventing those games from having better combat mechanics. The problem is entirely an issue of design: 3rd-person combat is a hard problem for two reasons.
The first is the camera. If the camera is fixed (as it was in Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil), the player can get into fights where he cannot see the enemy. If the camera is under player control, manipulating the camera at the same time you’re trying to fight can be very challenging. You want a very fast, free camera for when you’re running and turning, but the same controls in combat can have you whipsawing around, losing sight of your target.
The second is targeting. You only need to look at Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels to see this issue: in what is considered a blockbuster action series, the player’s ability to target and attack enemies in melee or ranged combat is heavily compromised. Compared to first-person shooters, which might as well be Photoshop for how easy and precise they make targeting, third-person targeting is a mess. Lock-on is typically how this is solved (the first 3D Zelda game did this) but multiple opponents can make lock-on very frustrating – and again, I’d cite the GTA series here, since they threw multiple enemies at you in close quarters and gave you lock-on, with the result that you’d keep wailing on the same guy while three other guys cut you to pieces. And this was in a series widely praised as a great action game.
The early survival-horror games did a poor job because the entire industry was doing a poor job, because this is a hard problem and it has taken a couple generations of games to find a solution. I would argue that Gears of War is the first third-person game to give the player a smooth and responsive first-person level of control over targeting. We weren’t waiting for better chips to enable third-person action; we just had to keep iterating from game to game until we got somewhere that worked.
Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil could have had melee attack combos, an advancement system with more attack unlocks, etc. They didn’t. I believe this was because they were deliberately designing games that eschewed action in favor of tension and drama. The failure in this decision is that they were still trying to make games that took many hours to play, and they failed to come up with any forms of conflict besides combat and environmental puzzle-solving.
I didn’t enjoy the Silent Hill games that much because that combat was so bad, and yet for all their atmosphere and symbolism you couldn’t avoid the terrible combat. The first undead nurse I had to desperately club to death with a flashlight in a shadowy nightmare realm was scary; the thirtieth undead nurse was just tiresome. Their explanation that it’s a game of mood, and not action, is undercut by the fact that they have so much combat, yet that same insistence has led them to give combat mechanics short shrift.
The fundamental problem here is that videogames have not evolved past combat as their primary form of interaction. The branching-tree dialogues of the BioWare games is the only popular alternative route we’ve found to deliver meaty, game-defining (and game-filling) interaction. The evolution of the survival horror games towards a more action-oriented approach is for that reason: you can solve environmental puzzles, or you can have long, rambling conversations with agenda-defined NPCs, or you can kill things. I would posit that survival horror is not enhanced by long branching conversations with NPCs, so that leaves puzzles and combat. That’s all we’ve got so far in our toolbox for these kinds of games.
That, of course, is embarrassing. There are experiments in other directions, as with Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. But for now, what console games do well is killing things, and when you look at the survival horror genre, it’s clear that its biggest weakness – without stepping outside the problem set they’ve defined – is in crappy combat. They’ve solved that now, and in the process have exposed the real failure: we don’t know how to make moody, atmospheric games that last 10-20 hours without stuffing them full of killing things. We have to step outside of the initial problem set of survival horror and ask how we can give players meaningful, game-filling interaction in a moody, suspenseful environment without resorting to combat. We have a long way to go.
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[The preceding was a contribution by Microsoft Game Studios' John Scott Tynes, Producer, Xbox Live Productions, published with permission.]
