You are riding in a vehicle through a warzone. Your local man on the ground casually fills you in on just how bad things have gotten here as you rumble roughshod over areas that, despite being torn and savage, are beautiful in their own next-gen way. As you drive, you look around you at all the signs of degeneration; you hear distant explosions, perhaps catch the foxfire glow of a nearby inferno.Now, quick -- which video game are you playing?
If you're unsure, you're not alone. The illuminating car ride has apparently become the exposition-of-choice for war shooters, from Metal Gear 4 and Call of Duty to Far Cry 2, and perhaps it makes sense; as an arriving mercenary, you've got to get to the conflict somehow, and your view from the passenger side is simultaneously the most effective and the most realistic way for a game to introduce the player to the story environment.
So I can't knock Far Cry 2 for hauling it out yet again, even as the intro, despite how innovative and tight-knit the game itself is in many respects, gave me distinct deja vu. I can't think of a single more appropriate way for the game to open -- and yet it brought me into the game feeling slightly cynical, like there's nothing new under the sun, and oh, sigh, here comes yet another shooter again.
In other words, Far Cry 2 was begging a penalty for making the most appropriate design choice, just because several other titles have already arrived at the same conclusion. Which begs, to me, an interesting question: If what we're after is realism and intuitiveness, there has to be a "best practice" for just about any element of a story you can produce -- so what happens when more and more games stumble on the most design-appropriate formula for their genre?
Several of our "best moments in gaming" are so designated because they created a deceptively simple circumstance that was so reminiscent of real life that we found it touching; being able to watch a movie with Jenny in The Darkness comes to mind. But what happens to that moment when other games have the exact same one, simply because bonding on the couch over a flick is something that coupled characters are naturally quite likely to do? Is BioShock now the only game that's allowed to begin with a plane crashing into the ocean?
I'm definitely considering whether our quest for game design efficiently streamlined for realism will harm our parallel objectives for innovation. What do you guys think?
Incidentally, Far Cry 2 is a decent shooter, the fire stuff is about as awesome as you've heard it is, but it is still a shooter, and therefore holds little for those who aren't into shooters. Ever since I bucked my trend of eschewing anything remotely FPS-like in order to try BioShock, I've been willing to check out just about any title that contains interesting peripheral elements. But as my colleague Chris Dahlen notes, FC2 lacks mission variety, so once you get tired of gawking at the savannah in the first hour or two, you'll get tired of the game soon after.
I did appreciate the open-worldness, though. There's nothing more liberating than being tersely instructed to rescue a hostage -- and then promptly ignoring your instructions to drive twenty minutes in the other direction in order to burn grass instead.
One more current item on war games and warzones; you may have seen over the weekend that Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling thinks that Activision senior producer Noah Heller, who's been doing the talk circuit to promote Call of Duty 5, is a "senior super douche" who needs to quit the negative comparisons to CoD4. That little conflict blew up on the blogs over the weekend, just as Heller gets done telling Gamasutra about how cross-competition results in a better game. I suppose it's easy to have that opinion when you're the one with the newer title coming out. I always find it illuminating when the contentious relationship between publisher-side producers and studio folks makes it into the headlines, because I'm often made aware of how annoying it is to developers for a producer to be the one who enjoys primary name association with a project in the headlines.
I wonder if Bowling still has a job today? To say the industry rewards people for outspokenness would be an unfortunate fallacy.
