Learning to Hate All Over Again: ZENO CLASH

We're jumping back to the bottom of the alphabet (all the way from W!) because I received a free copy of Zeno Clash. You may be shocked to find out that I didn't like it very much.

These versus screens are pretty slick, though.

The game commits a multitude of sins, but today I just want to talk about two fairly common narrative devices that Zeno Clash manages to completely foul up.

1) The Diegetic Tutorial. In these increasingly common sequences, a character (or, occasionally, delusion or sentient computer program) within the game teaches you how to play the game under the pretense of putting you through a training course. Now, I understand the desire to couch everything crunchy within something fluffy, to always ensconce a mechanic in a bit of story and flavor. Theoretically, relating every game concept through the fictional world aids immersion.
The problem with this is mostly that it causes frustration, especially if you're replaying the game. Many games rely on control conceits common within their genres, so tutorials are often completely unnecessary for experienced players; a person who plays first-person shooters regularly does not need to be told that W moves forward and mouse1 attacks. Worse, these sequences are far too rarely removed from the main game and often cannot be skipped. This all works against the intent because nothing breaks immersion quite like being compelled to scream "I KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE GAME, PLEASE LET ME PLAY THE GAME" at your screen.
These sequences really work best when they're not a part of the main game—perhaps behind a "Tutorial" option at the main menu—or when they can be skipped easily. The latter is trivial to implement: your instructor/sensei/evaluator/robot asks "Do you know how to X?" and then you answer in the negative to start the tutorial or in the affirmative to skip it. Zeno Clash, impressively, manages to screw this up even worse than most games. Not only is the tutorial a mandatory but thoroughly unimportant part of the main story, but (presumably to ensure that the game's Half-Life 2-style chapter structure doesn't let you skip past it easily) it's broken up into three parts that occur during three different chapters. And then, to really rub it in, the controls for the game are incredibly simple (yet somehow still frustratingly inconsistent*) and there's nothing in the tutorial actually worth learning.

2) The Lure of the Unknown. It's common in many different media for creators to attempt to pull the audience into a story by starting them with insufficient information to understand the earliest events of the plot. The author hopes that the mystery will entice the audience to stick around, wondering "Who's that man? Why does he have a gun? Whoa, where'd that robot come from? Wait, am I in the wrong theater?"
Sometimes this works beautifully, but frankly I think it fails more often than it succeeds. Frequently it ends up looking amateurish and driving the audience away because they have difficulty identifying with characters who are strangers and caring about situations that they know nothing about.
Even in the cases where it works, though, it's vital to open the information valve pretty early on. Regardless of their quality, enigmas grow stale quickly if not hydrated with a little bit of insight now and again, and this is where Zeno Clash fails in a way that seems almost malicious. This mysterious woman that travels with us, what's her story? Who is she? How do the Corwids survive long enough to grow into adults if they're so single minded about things that they never stop to eat? How did ANYONE not immediately know Father-Mother's "secret"? What happened to the gun I was carrying? Why can't I just sneak back into town myself? Who could possibly have thought that ending was a good idea? All these questions and more, Zeno Clash boldly refuses to answer.
Seriously, there is a woman with you in nearly every scene in the game and the only thing you learn about her is her name. Why did she decide to hang out with you? What drives her? The game's only response is a resounding "Who cares? She's not actually a character! We just needed some reason for the protagonist to slowly divulge uninteresting memories."

*You press Spacebar while walking sideways to step out of the way of enemy attacks, but this only works if your hands are empty. If you're holding a weapon, Spacebar throws the weapon instead. Several times during the game, you are expected to fight charging enemies who can only be damaged with weapons, but if you try to dodge to the side when they charge you all that happens is you throw your hammer at them and then get flattened. Brilliant design decisions, guys.

To Conclude the Interlude

The other half of that thing I posted last time, once again mostly to justify my time expenditure.

Holiday Tidings

Happy Easter from PAX, bitches!

Also, I'm sorry about all the profanity. If my mother read my blog, she would be appalled.

Interlude

This isn't really the point of this blog, but I've been working on this for a little while and it's the reason I haven't posted anything recently, so I present my video tutorial on Blood Bowl, a very excellent game indeed:

The next proper update will be about the copy of Zeno Clash that I got for free during the Steam Christmas sale. It should be coming soon(ish).

Trial By Style: WHO'S THAT FLYING?!

PEWPEWPEWPEW

Yeah, it's that game. You fly around, you shoot stuff, you get weapon upgrades, you shoot more stuff, you fight interesting new enemy types, you shoot more stuff, you are challenged to the very limit of your abilities, and then you shoot more stuff. I hope you really enjoy holding down the fire button.

MediaTonic tried to differentiate their little shooter from the rest of the vaguely spaceship-shaped pack by giving it a generous measure of style. It has significantly more story than most games of its genre (in that it has any at all), given in the form of the wisecracking space-robot protagonist's testimony at his own trial with the game levels representing his recounting of his heroic deeds. The story is pretty humorous and frankly the presentation of the whole thing is quite slick, so the question is: Can sharp delivery counteract mechanical flaws?

As I hinted before, there's only slightly more gameplay in this thing than there are punctuation marks in its title, but I'm a sucker for a bit of good writing and clever humor. Who's That Flying?! provides some of that (in addition to a couple of cheap Uranus jokes, and I'm not too good for those either) in addition to attractive art and a couple of pretty slick animations of your character forming a baseball bat out of pure energy and then bludgeoning a monster to death with it. The end result is that I played this game for 90 minutes or so, when I probably wouldn't have gotten past 10 without the flash and the amusing story. Clearly, I find presentation to be a very compelling feature in a game, and it will drive me to continue playing even if the gameplay itself isn't terribly fun. (It is however worth noting that I didn't find it compelling enough to get all the way through the game.)

Come to think of it, I've also purchased games a few times based on their presentation before being sure that I'd enjoy the gameplay. But, as I wrote when talking about Apocalypse, I'm also willing to forgive flawed presentation when the gameplay or mechanics are compelling. So in the end, all I've really proven is that I have low standards, I'm willing to put up with a lot, and I am absolved of guilt for all my complaining because all those games that I don't like must be really, truly awful.

Context Insensitive: THE WITCHER 2

First of all, The Witcher 2 is a vast improvement over the original. The dialogue is (sometimes) better, the combat is (largely) smoother, and the story line is (legitimately!) more intriguing. I say this only as proof that I do actually like some video games. It does not figure in to the larger point being made.

THE LARGER POINT BEING MADE

Geralt of Rivia displays his all-consuming torch fetish.

It turns out that in this installment, Geralt has become a mute pacifist who can only communicate through Morse code signaled via igniting and extinguishing torches with his crazy witcher magic. Well, either that or he's hoping to distract the guards with the medieval equivalent of a lightswitch rave. (Strangely, Geralt does not suggest that you use this ability to spontaneously generate fire at no cost to obviate combat by simply burning the guards alive as soon as you see them.)
For those who haven't played the sequence, Geralt is attempting a prison break armed with only a crude wooden club and the glistening abs of a young Brad Pitt. He instructs you to be sneaky for no reason at all--the guards are complete pushovers even on the highest difficulty, which is quite embarrassing considering their armaments and numerical superiority--and then you creep around in the shadows and stealth bludgeon people for a while. While sneaking, you can extinguish and, for some reason, reignite the torches on the walls from a distance, although once again there is no real impetus to do so as it doesn't seem to affect the guards' (in)ability to see you at all.
Unfortunately, in a bit of brilliance that I can only attribute to nobody on the development team ever having played this section of the game, the control for toggling the torches is the left mouse button. You may recognize this as the button used for combat in every video game since the beginning of time including this one, leading to scenes such as the above in which Geralt refuses to fight and instead treats the enemies to an impromptu magic show.
Overloaded controls are increasingly common in games, owing in large part to the fact that the modern video game protagonist needs to be able to shoot, swordfight, toggle running mode, sprint, reload, sneak, stick fiber optic cables under doors, juggle, converse fluently in ASL, crouch, pick his teeth, jump, double jump, spin jump, fire the grappling hook, spin double jump, switch fire modes, change weapons, enter his inventory, use his quick slots, combo skills together, and arm wrestle while modern video game console controllers only have like 8 buttons. Some overloading has to occur in certain cases.
However, "on a keyboard" is not one of those cases. With 40 or 50 buttons at my disposal, there's really no reason for four different functions to be assigned to any of them. Even so, most context-sensitive control schemes are perfectly reasonable, which is part of what makes the other cases* so bewildering. In many cases we could just blame shoddy portsmanship and developers being too lazy to change the control mappings from the XBox, but the Witcher 2 came out on PC first (and in fact, as of the time of this is post, it's PC exclusive). In that light, the decision seems inexplicable. So why would CD Projekt do it this way?
Hell if I know. Maybe they're performing some sort of Polish ritual magic that draws its power from the annoyance and alienation of their fans. It would certainly explain some of their other dubious behaviors.




*Rainbow Six Vegas 2 comes to mind here. "Look under the door stealthily with fiber optic wire" and "fling the door open in such a way as to alert everyone in the room and start a big firefight" are on the same key and actually occur in the same context (looking at a door). The only difference is in the angle of your head: look down just right and you peek under the door like a super spy, or look two pixels above that to perform some Rambo moves instead. Once again, one wonders how something like this made it to the finished product. Was there no QA at all?
Addendum: Crap. Now I'm going to have to think of something else to be upset about when I get to that game.

You Didn't Say the Black Magic Word: THE WITCHER, concluded

I intended to make another short video showcasing a montage of the most outstanding moments of the first few hours of the Witcher for this update, but I found it surprisingly difficult to get myself to play any more of the thing. More than once I sat down to play the Witcher, hovered my cursor over the button, and then... you know, games of Blood Bowl need playing, and probably I could catch up on Parks and Recreation, and really I ought to update my blog but wait first I'd have to play the Witcher CRAP BACKPEDAL MAYBE I SHOULD GO FOR A RUN. (If you know me, you know that the very idea of me choosing to run on purpose is a sign of some serious extinction-level desperation.)

So why?
Clearly I think that the game is pretty crummy. More specifically, I have a particular affinity for presentation and writing, and this game... well, I heard that the developers had released an update for the game with an improved script and voice acting and I thought "Oh, that'll help me get through it!" Imagine my disappointment when it turned out that that's the version I was playing already.
But that's a pretty vague and shallow reaction, so I sat and had a good hard think about why, exactly, this game is so repugnant to me. The first thing that came to mind was that it overreaches, by which I mean that it tries too hard to deliver things of which it is incapable. There's tons of dialogue, but the writing is significantly subpar, and the plot as far as I've gotten is pretty weak. The game has cinematic pretenses, but its "actors" lack the articulation (both vocal and generally in the face region) to deliver performances sufficient to make the camera work anything but distracting. In addition, it follows the regrettably common trend of video game graphics in an attempt to make things look as realistic as possible, which always ends up looking bad a few years hence. The game tries and tries and tries, but it doesn't seem to have the resources to accomplish even one of the things it's attempting. So is that it? Am I driven back by all the unfulfilled ambition?
My regular readers (both of them!) will remember that I actually rather like overambitious games. There's obviously a difference between the two, though: the unfulfilled ambition of Apocalypse really has more to do with its technical execution--a lack of polish in the implementation of ambitious ideas--while the failures of the Witcher are of a decidedly more mundane sort. Really, the things I've been talking about at which the Witcher fails are perfectly ordinary: have your voice actors speak in the way that primary speakers of the language speak, write a script that doesn't make the reader groan audibly more than once a minute, design a control scheme that doesn't make it feel like your character is fighting while immersed in cold peanut butter, etc. The failures of the Witcher are less in the camp of "failing to execute grand ideas" and much more in the neighborhood of "basic incompetence". We've all seen basic incompetence before, though. Hell, I'd say that X-Com Enforcer is worse than this game in every way, and I still managed to compel myself to boot that up more than a couple of times.
I wish I had a good answer. Frankly, I just don't know exactly what it is about the Witcher that repels me so. Honestly, there may even be a perfectly good game in there somewhere, but if not even one element of it is going to show up within the first hour, then I simply haven't got the time for it, certainly not with well over a hundred games left in the queue.

And so it is that I say a fond and eager farewell to Geralt of Rivia and his world of combat pirouettes and steely-eyed female cyborgs longing to be human. Hopefully I'll have a better experience with the next game, which is... oh, hell.