Role Playing Déjà vu

Many things are re-used in the gaming industry; physics engines are licensed as it is often cheaper to rent one than to make your own, characters and worlds are remade into sequels and cross-overs, and one of the most common and the worst is when story elements are rehashed. Not only does video gaming do this, but the entire media industry seems to be in the habit of repacking old ideas with new shiny explosions and CGI characters. If this were a blog on movies, you would hear me rant on Avatar being Pocahontas: 3000.

This, however, is a blog on video games. So today you will hear a rant on how RPGs, or role-playing games, reuse several of the same story elements. Over. And over. And over again.

I am certain that most of this information is cataloged elsewhere; this is simply a tirade of my own feelings on the subject and for people to discuss. I just ask for no one to link me to TvTropes. I don’t feel like losing twelve hours of my life right now.

It’s a Good Start

Perhaps the worst position for any RPG character to be in is to be the parent’s of the main character. Either one of them is never mentioned at all or they were horribly maimed. There are no other options for such characters. A missing parent may come back as a villain, but they were either mauled as a lead up to their disappearance, or they likely end up destroyed at the hands of the main character himself, or both in some circumstances. Fathers have it especially bad, as they are usually the ones that turn up as villains, are never mentioned at all, or were brutally murdered before or at the start of the game to fuel the character’s vengeance.

The best characters, in theory, are those that have both personal and worldly reasons behind their quest. Many RPGs try to exploit this by thinking that family death or destruction is a great personal reason that works in any situation to give the hero a good familiar reason to go do their quest. Yet, it gets old. To the point that some characters lacking the personal reasoning have been better than those who are avenging their father who turns out to be the very thing they hate. There can also be other personal motives behind a character than a stolen girlfriend or a murdered childhood. It is just sad when you start a brand new RPG and expect the main character’s father to be dead or long gone or not even touched upon and you’ll almost always be right.

Perhaps due to their lack of parents or a mother sobbing over a father’s death and thus forgetting her responsibilities as a parent, it is a common theme that RPG heroes wake up late on their Big Day, which happens to be the start of the game. Either he had some important Test of Skill or the Generic Town-wide Celebration was today, and the main character just missed the start. Yet, this plays into the plot by making him just miss the bandits that ransacked the town while he slept or the important sage character is out of neat weapons to give him. No one seems to complain, though, if he shows up at the laboratory late or make a big deal of how he slept through the screams of burning peasants, so it all seems to be the natural and normal thing to do that you soon forget that he was late or wonder why they made it a point at all outside of riding on past victories of previous games.

Now, all of these previous situations are usually only important if the character is a younger person just on the brim of adulthood or still a teenager. Characters that begin at an older age have their very own start to an adventure. Amnesia! It’s the time-old excuse for having an aged character need to start at level one as well as go through tutorial levels. The concept also commonly pops up in other places in games, and it albeit is rarer than the previous starts discussed just due to the rarity of a RPG hero to not be a teenager, but it always seems to be used in the situations where inexperience isn’t an excuse. People cannot start new jobs at age thirty five obviously; you have to start training in a career at ten years old and keep it for your entire life without ever branching out or learning anything new. You can only learn the same things over again by conveniently getting amnesia as you are about to embark in a quest.

The Company You Keep… And They Keep… And They Also Keep…

Most RPGs have a party of characters that join and accompany the main hero on his quest through the world. Sadly, not all of these characters are as vibrant and three-dimensional as the main character or not even close to him.

Many games will have one neat character though, one who has a completely unique fighting style and is definitely not a human or anything close. They could attack with slot machines, frying pans, or even kitchen utensils while their bodies are all colors of the rainbow and all shapes and sizes. Sadly, these characters don’t get much work beyond making them different. These strange fighting tactics are usually terrible compared to normal characters, even when the gambles ‘pay off.’ They rarely appear outside of the scenes where you originally get them in your party and only occupy spaces in the back during important story moments. Rarer yet is for them to even get a ‘moment’ of their own, where they have an epiphany or something happens with them to tug the player’s heartstrings a bit.

Sadder yet, it seems the developers spend all the time they have on making party members unique on that one guy. For the rest of your party members, you have a mage, a knight, a healer, a thief, and usually a double or combination character. The knight is almost always a super good guy who follows the law and hates the thief’s guts. The healer is a girl and usually is the damsel in distress many times as well as the main character’s primary love interest. Usually the thief is a shifty type who originally planned to use your party for their own devices but tends to turn around at some point in the adventure. The thief is also often the main character’s rival from old times that begrudgingly joins him due to circumstances at the time.

The Final Act… For the Fourteenth Time

Despite the obvious jab at the name of the series, this section isn’t about Final Fantasy directly. This is about the end of the game, the final curtain, another section of role-playing games that are simply rife with clichés that pop up in many games in the genre. Such as plot twists that are no longer surprising in the least as they happen every single time.

The definite one that happens in pretty much every single role-playing game is the final boss of the title. Either the main villain you fought tooth-and-nail grows some dark angelic wings or an extra-dimensional demon that was really pulling the strings pops out of nowhere, but the end result is that the final boss is not the villain you were fighting all along and they are typically a big and bad monstrosity or the epitome of unholy. Seriously, I can’t even think of a single example where this is not the case.

Why is this done? Well, obviously to give you a big and scary monster to face off against where you know the fate of the world is decided by the fight’s outcome. Why is this bad? Obviously because every role-playing game out there does it and there is no stopping it. You expect to not face the same villain you’ve learned to detest through your trials at their hands as the final boss. You know the developers are going to throw you a ‘twist’ and make you fight something else or make that villain grow devilish features and several feet of height by the end. Some role-playing games don’t even fully explain the final boss. You face off against the villain, defeat them, then all of a sudden – BAM – here’s a monstrous demon for you to fight whose name you won’t remember after you defeat him unlike the other villain who was actually a pushover.

Why can’t a game keep the major villain to the end? Honestly, I don’t know. I think somewhere there’s a developer who tries this before a producer comes in and shouts, “No! We need bigger! More evil!” I’m sure some developers are also deluded into thinking that it is still surprising that there’s another boss after you finish with the main villain. Perhaps the villains they created weren’t good enough. There has to be a reason out there, but I honestly don’t think it needs to be kept true.

Then, when everything is said and done, you’re not done with the clichés. Quite usually, during the final cut scenes, one of your party members will die. Sorry, I spoiled that for you, but there is almost always a valiant sacrifice on the behalf of your party or even your main character. That, or one of your characters was really an other-wordly being who fades back into their own dimension now that their work is complete. All-in-all, your party will not survive past the final boss fight intact. There will either be a heroic sacrifice, someone departing to other planes, or just everyone splitting up and never speaking again with each other despite fighting for their lives together.

Many RPGs do try new things, and sadly they don’t often get credit for it. Hell, I probably did not give enough credit to many RPGs with this, both the ones that try to avoid the old failsafes and the ones that are chock full of clichés yet are still good otherwise. Many games that are not the popular titles that began these clichés slip right under the radar and their originality is never awarded. I am also sure that producers (bane of most designer’s dreams and creativity) have a lot of say in this re-use of plot elements, perhaps as much as the unoriginality in the developer’s court.

While humanity has a lot to learn from history, and the saying goes that we should not repeat the past’s mistakes, there gets to be a point where too much repetition of the past’s success gets to be a mistake.

If I Wanted Realism I’d Join That MMO Titled ‘Real Life’

Realism. You see it toted around on the backs of game boxes and spoken so often at game expos. More games claim to be the most realistic game to date than movies claim to be the best film of the summer or the only movie you want to see this year.

Realistic graphics, realistic physics, realistic weapons… The list goes on. The big thing has been realism since gaming consoles evolved beyond chipset tunes and repeating sprite backgrounds. It has typically spurred good changes in the industry such as a goal for more powerful gaming consoles and improved the quality of voice acting in every genre, yet only recently has it gone out of control.

I, and I know countless others, who play video games to escape real life. I would rather pull out an unrealistic laser cannon than be stuck with a small little gun that has the horrible limitations of ammo. I would rather jump from rooftop to rooftop to be a cool ninja than to be stuck barely hopping a few feet off the ground. I would love a game where you blow someone up and candy and confetti pour out of their wounds than graphic gore.

I know I do not speak for everyone in every single instance of the world, nor do I only want those things. I am only setting out points to show that realism is not always king nor can it always be accurately portrayed in video games. I won’t even get into an argument on realistic games rotting our children’s brains as such things are quite silly. Now, I want a piñata-killing game…

Why Is Everything So Dark?

I don’t know about you, but I have vision problems. My eyes are terrible. I still, however, have not had as much issue seeing things in real life as much as I do in “realistic” games. Never have I seen a real world occasion where everything is as brown or dark as half of the war games on the market nowadays. Recently they seem to have pulled away from this, but to prevent relapse, it needs to be battered into several game developer’s heads that real life is not brown. Someone needs to steal their tan-tinted goggles or whatever else made some people think such a stupid thing as the outside world being eternally overcast by russet clouds.

Then there are the games that try to portray a real life night time… Where everything is black. Pitch black. Nope, you don’t get any help. This may be helpful in horror games to set the mood, but every other genre needs to lighten things up. If I get asked to find a black box on the side of a black building in the pitch black of a moonless night again, I shall scream.

Yes, realistically humans cannot see much at night without the help of lights? So what? We want to be able to see the amount of work you put into the enemies and environment in a game. We need to be able to see the doorway to know where to go next without running around aimlessly in a single corridor for half an hour. Dark settings are fine. Darkness to add to suspense is fine. Having a game where you cannot see what you need to see is just frustrating.

I’m Not Quite Sure but I Think Someone Is Shooting Me

One of the more recent, relatively speaking, achievements in making games more realistic is to completely remove any sort of visible user interface or heads up display. After all, it only makes sense as we don’t have a menu or health bar floating around us in real life, right? We have to rely on these magical things called nerves to know how much we are hurting or if we can pick up an object to interact with it.

The problem comes in that our nerves only work with our body. Our own physical form is the only thing we can feel. We cannot feel how much mister random soldier on screen is hurt. If there was a game where you could, well, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to play it. This is why the user interface was created and why we need one.

I’m not asking for the entire lower half of the screen like the old original first person shooters or something to clog up the four corners of a screen. Not every game needs everything either. I don’t need to know how much ammo I have in a Mario game nor do I need to know how many Power Stars I have every five seconds in Call of Duty. I would, however, like a more concrete way to know my character is dying other than… My screen is flashing red slightly more than it was flashing a second ago.

Not to mention, in several of these games where the only heads up display is the flashing red when you’re injured, your wounds will heal after the screen stops its annoying crimson blinking. That doesn’t seem very realistic to me. I don’t think I’d heal from five bullet wounds in about thirty seconds. It seems kind of pointless to me to make a game more realistic by deleting that ancient piece of hardware known as a health bar and instead adding in the –obviously- much more believable magical mutant healing powers. I’m certain humanity will figure out little robots to fly above your head to show how long you have to live well before we figure out how to heal from a shotgun blast as if it were a prick on the finger.

This isn’t only true for health. I want to know I’m low on ammunition –before- my gun starts clicking. If I’m in a free flowing overworld where I can head wherever I want at any time, I want a map to know where I’m going. If I have a time limit, I want to know exactly how much time I do indeed have. Cutting back on excess junk is great! But cutting back on what you need is quite the opposite.

Talk… Talk… Talk… Talk… Can I Flirt Now? No… Talk…

Thankfully this last big moment of too much realism seems to mostly be contained to a single genre of games. The simulation. Back to my original point; why do we often play games? To get away from real life. Why do we want to get away from real life? Because it’s often more boring than the alternative.

Why would I spend half an hour watching a character read a book inside a video game when I could very easily go over there and read a book? The Sims rests on such a precarious fence between reality and virtual reality that it has to be mentioned in this. I’m not saying the game is terrible, it’s obviously not with the amount of people I constantly hear about getting addicted to it. Yet, I’m not saying it is perfect either. It does its job of being a reality simulator where you can control a family that (you hope) has a better life than your own. Yet, there are several points where it brings in the tedium of real life where it doesn’t need to.

One of the biggest challenges of the game is finding time to get everything done in a day. You need to eat, sleep, socialize, take care of your business, work, and so on. Yet, due to the time being cut down, many activities take far too much percentage of a day. If I wanted to stress about not having enough time to do everything in a day, I would play more video games… Wait, not the best example.

What I am trying to say here is that it seems the Sims brought in way too many of the boring or tedious elements of our lives and made them still boring and tedious in the game. While, yes, for a true reality simulator the Sims still need to use the restroom. However, the developers could have made showers not take two hours of in-game time. Nor does it take half an hour to take out the trash. Or pay your bills.

And it isn’t simply real life simulators that pose problems of too much reality. Job simulators also seem prone to bring in far too much of the tedium of the task and not enough of the fun. By job simulators, I mean the various “Tycoon” titles or similar things such as Evil Genius. Evil Genius is certainly a great example of a game that brought in too much of the trouble of the task. You have five stats to worry about on every single henchman, visitor to your island, and enemy. You have to watch henchmen all over the globe constantly. You have to monitor your base constantly to properly tag every foe or visitor so your henchmen know what to do with them. You have to constantly deal with every inch of your base’s construction and maintenance. You have to manage henchmen training and recruitment. You have to control your biggest henchmen’s abilities. You have to manage money, stolen goods, and doomsday weapon products. All. At. Once. I’m sure I’m missing several things. The only way to succeed in the game is to be able to multi-task the ever-loving snot out of your island and its inhabitants. All of the work you have to do tends to over shadow the fun you’re having, which is a shame on such a fun concept. It makes you wonder when you’ll be getting your check in the mail for managing such a huge company… if you do so successfully.

Realism is a great step to improving games in general, yet with every single human advancement made, there are people that still persist in mucking it all up. Trial and error is how we seem to succeed as an industry, so hopefully we will have less people repeating the errors.

Difficulty – OR – Making or Breaking Both the Game and the Player

Difficulty is certainly a touchy subject that has recently gotten a lot of debate in some sectors of the gaming fanbase. There are people arguing about whether video games have become far too easy in recent years or if it was a good change for the difficulty to be toned down.

Back when video games were first becoming popular, there was a clear reason for difficulty. If a player could blow through an arcade game in one round of quarters, then the creators obviously failed. The point was to get everyone to spend their weekly allowance to keep on trekking after a game over, getting them to move on once they ran out of money so a new customer could step up and begin feeding the machine its delicious metal currency dinner.

Yet, as games transferred over to consoles, game designers saw reason to keep the difficulty element in games. Why? The reasons were obvious when you watched a kid playing on the old arcade machines. A kid didn’t shrug and walk away when he fell to the awesome boss at the end of a level. No. He pumped in more corners, adorned his game face, and wore out the buttons on the machine with a vengeance. He grew attached to the villains of the game and held a determination to triumph in his heart. This kept many going for hours if they had the resources.

Now why would a person spend over a hundred dollars on a console followed by more money dished out for each game if they could blow through it on their first playthrough without batting an eyelash? Developers brought difficulty to the home consoles to make games last longer and to help the players get more involved. It certainly helped players learn to despise the evil forces terrorizing the digital world even if said evil was only a few pixels when they couldn’t beat him in one go or even ten attempts.

Yet, as time goes on, game companies seem to be padding games with more and more content that isn’t quite difficult to pad up the length of the games so that you do not feel bad about spending fifty dollars on a small metal disc. Many see this as a disturbing trend and point to another eventual decline in gaming. Many others yet see this as a welcomed change as that difficulty isn’t needed as you no longer play games by the game over in modern years, so now everyone has a chance to clear through the latest title on the shelf instead of just the best of the best.

Still, some difficulty is definitely needed in video games. Why else would you play a video game in the first place if not for some challenge? Yet, more companies are tossing in time sinks and other false difficulty that only take down the quality of the game as a whole.

False Difficulty – The Bad and the Ugly

There are several things that are used to beef up total play times in video games nowadays that were not around on the original home consoles or arcade machines; some are good like well-thought out and beautiful cut scenes while others can be quite despicable. The most blatant slight that they will toss at gamers is false difficulty, which I will define for usage in my blog as: Any moment in a video game that is not meant to challenge a player’s ability but to deliberately take up their time, effort, and patience with little reward in turn and no concern for fairness.

The most prominent time sink lacking in any real difficulty would be the grind. In no way is it difficult at all to kill the faceless and weak random minions hundreds of times until your allies like you enough or until you finally find that super rare drop. It is only a waste of time. Small grinds are certainly acceptable and can add to the difficulty of a game for sure. Yet, if you have to kill thousands of the same NPC with no difference in the grind that is one word: monotonous.

Grinds have appeared in many video games and while they most prominently exist in the genre of RPGs and MMORPGs (especially the latter), many other games have picked up on the most efficient, from a developer standpoint, time sink to place into games. I have played more and more platformer or adventure titles that require you to run the same level over and over again without any added difficulty to unlock later levels. Certainly, it is fine to have a player go through a level again with a new objective such as adding harder enemies everywhere or setting everything on fire around them, but having them coast through the same exact level again and again to earn level-unlocking points is simply ridiculous.

While on that subject, when I say that adding difficulty to a level and having the player run it again is fine, I mean that real difficulty needs to be added. One of the most frustrating things to exist in the world of video games are speed runs. Some are a good type of frustrating, certainly! Yet, many more are excessive difficult and require everything to be done perfectly, for the stars and planets to align, and for you to have bribed the game console with several dinners and other acts I shall not mention on this blog. Speed runs requiring you to be nearly perfect can be fine, but that is certainly rare. The problem comes from random elements. Enemy movements, rising and falling platforms, and other things that make you have to wait or spend time doing something other than running to the goal can make those near-perfect speed runs the most tedious things in existence.

Perhaps the next most common form of false difficulty added as a shortcut are computer opponents that cheat. While it is quite common to shout that the AI pulled a fast one on you whenever something just happens to go wrong, there are many games where over the years fans have proved that the computers do have it out for the players. In the past this was done to make up for places where AI programming lacked for a multitude of reasons, yet those reasons are disappearing fast. AI cheating is perhaps most notable in racing games or any competitive games with random elements. In many racing games, computers will suddenly drive faster than would be possible if you drove their car when they are off the screen. If you’ve maintained too far a lead in the current league, they may even begin to cheat while still on your screen; ignoring obstacles, gaining items without passing through an item box, going far faster than their car make should allow, or defying the laws of physics if they bump into you.

The final bit of false difficulty I want to touch on, I actually mentioned in the first water article I wrote. I read in a discussion on the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake someone’s opinion who was furious for them making the game easier… All because they are going to simplify the equipping of the Iron Boots. You will no longer have to go into the start menu and flip around the menus before denying that you want to save because you used the wrong button to exit the menu. This is the exact type of false difficulty I am speaking about. It does make you take more time to get through the Water Temple, but there is no true difficulty added to it from fiddling around in the menus; only tedium and annoyance. And now I promise to not rant much more on that topic… Too much.

Real Difficulty – The Good and the Really, Really, Really Good

Whereas false difficulty is the poison seeping into video games, real difficulty is the cure and the antidote. Now, what is real difficulty? I would define it as elements added to the game with the purpose of challenging the player’s skills and helping the player to grow in his abilities at playing the game.

So now we’re not just talking about making a super hard game, we’re talking about having a game that teaches you how to play it and helps you gain the skills needed for later challenges you will face during your time playing it. A good learning curve is the utmost key for any video game to be fun. Too low of a leveling curve and the game will be boring and likely packed with the more tedious forms of false difficulty. Too steep of a learning curve and the game inherits false difficulty for the reason of not preparing the player for what was ahead, causing plenty of needless frustration.

There are many good ways to difficulty to levels the player has already been through, even without changing a thing on the level. A requirement to collect or destroy all of a certain object can certainly be a fantastic way to accomplish this if done correctly. The player will likely not hit them all or be able to get them all on the first play through and that automatically adds a more challenging revisit to the level. A series that gets this perfect in its golden age would have to be the Crash Bandicoot series. While many of the later levels are innately hard, plenty of the early and ‘easy’ levels can be quite difficult when you have to break every single crate along the way.

The best moment for a truly difficult encounter usually comes in a boss encounter. By their very name, they should test a player’s skill to see if they are ready to progress in a game. Not only should they be a test, but also it feels better to lose over and over again to a boss than to the random preceding level as bosses are supposed to be tough. Yet, there seems to be a disturbing trend lately where many bosses are just not terribly difficult. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of nice boss fights out there, yet the number seems to be declining. One of the major problems seems to be that boss fights have been sped up. While I went on a rant about grinds earlier, some repetition in a game is definitely necessary. A boss needs to check if you have really learned the skills you were supposed to have gained in the previous levels and this means repeatedly checking those. A short boss fight that only requires you to use a maneuver once is prone to people brute forcing it or just getting lucky once and winning. A truly difficult boss fight needs some length to it.

A successful boss fight, from a design perspective, needs many things to ensure it is adequately difficult and keeps that learning curve on its way up a perfect slope. The boss needs to take some time, as I mentioned, yet the reason it needs to take time is that it needs to test various things. Not only should every random boss test the skills that took you through the last level, the final boss fight should test the skills that took you through the game. It’s become a common belief that in RPGs, the final boss of the game always pales in comparison to previous bosses, even the final villain’s previous forms. While tougher optional bosses are always a treat as far as difficulty goes, it rarely seems like a final boss from RPGs truly tests what the characters learned throughout the game and his lieutenants do a much better job of that. Optional bosses and harder modes of bosses do help bring this around, as they allow the common crowd to finish the game while giving the truly skilled players something to do, yet the final boss should be a bit better in most of these games.

Yet, I do want to list the game that I believe best hit the nail on the head when it came to the difficulty of the final boss battle. Banjo-Kazooie’s final boss battle came at you in two parts. You may laugh, but the first part of the fight was a game show. You were quizzed on elements of the game, made to play harder versions of various mini-games and events, and made to work both your brain and controller in a well-made equal mixture. Then, after a false credits sequence, you were pitted against the real final battle which made you use every collectable item you stocked up with and the various abilities you had to learn to make it to this point in the game. The fight itself progressively ramped up as it went onwards, lending more and more challenge that led to a truly memorable and difficult game ending.

An Apology

While I did originally state that I would not bring personal matters into the blog, some did kind of hit me shortly after I got started. I will spare the details on them as they are, as I said, personal, but I will simply state that in hindsight I chose the worst possible moment to get started on such a project.

I promise an update tonight as well as a more reliable update schedule in the future. Things have finally simmered down, so I can give this space the work it deserves. This is why I did not bother churning out things while I had issues springing up out of every crack as I could not give the time to make sure everything was made with the utmost quality. I cannot promise this will not happen again, but I can only hope that I won't have to deal with so much so suddenly again anytime soon.

This mostly goes out to the people I showed the blog to and were anticipating more from it. I promise I will get that out to you and I personally hope to draw in more visitors with a reliable update schedule.

~B

Water Levels – A Guide of How to Make Suck

You’re playing your new favorite game that was just released today and you finally beat a big boss, then as you get your new objective you making a discovery that rattles you to the core.

The next level is underwater.

You set the controller down, go to get a drink or a snack hoping that you misread something. Maybe the level is instead on a dried lake bed. No such luck. Maybe the water levels in this game won’t be as bad as before. Maybe the developers learned from their previous titles as well as other games on the market. Maybe you won’t flounder about for hours trying to get used to a backwards control scheme as you drown for the tenth time. Maybe…

Ah, no, it’s the same as every other game out there. The water levels, for lack of a better term, SUCK.

Don’t get me wrong, now. I don’t want them to suck. I love water in the real world; watching it, getting wet with it, listening to it, swimming in it… Just every game seems to have countless problems when it comes to water-filled areas.

Swimming in Games – More Complicated Than Piloting a Nuclear Submarine

The most glaring and universal problem to ever rear its ugly head during underwater segments are controls. Two buttons and a control stick do not handle the completely three-dimensional atmosphere of a submerged character’s movement capabilities well enough. Generally, there is a button to go up, a button to go down, and a way to “steer.” There is no way to paddle backwards, there is no way to swim at the same height while maintaining the same elevation, and often there is no way to adequately defend yourself or properly aim your offensive capabilities.

Typically your character is slowed to an unbearable speed, which makes getting anywhere take an hour or more. This doesn’t help the majesty of water any and there’s also the point that usually when you’re underwater you’re timed by a visible (or even worse – invisible) breath limit. I don’t know about you, but swimming in real life does not feel as hideously slow as swimming in games feels. Even when watching other people swim, they seem to have grace and agility far beyond what they do on land. Yet, every video game character seems to weigh more than an oil tanker when exposed to open water, despite being athletic enough to chop of heads in one swing, hang on narrow ledges with ease, and sprint from rooftop to rooftop while on land.

Then when it is time to get out of the water? Guess what! The same button you use to swim further is the button you’re supposed to use to also jump out of the water. Prepare to mash that button several times while trying to aim yourself towards the shore to finally get out of your watery grave. I could get into an entire rant on control schemes with multiple uses for a single button, and I think I likely will later on!

Up Periscope!

Terrible controls are a problem on their own; add in bad camera angles and you get a whole new game. It’s hard to swim upwards when you can’t figure out which way is up, after all. Just as with the last section on controls, I could write an entire article on cameras and displays, so expect more detail on this soon.

However you may think that the camera angle may be the hardest to maintain deep underwater where you have a completely three-dimensional space to look around in, you’d be wrong! The highest numbers of camera conflicts seem to happen near the surface of the water. When you’re right below the surface and try to look downwards, most games lock the camera to the surface and don’t allow you to see just what is swimming upwards to eat you.

Bad camera angles are only compounded by bad layout. Far too many water levels are a vast open sea with few-to-no identifying features visible in several areas. Sometimes when you’re underwater, all you see is your character and blue. When there are landmarks, they’re usually repeated in several places. Is that the same giant clamshell I passed earlier or a new one?

Even when not out in the ocean, there are bad level designs that only compound camera problems. One of the more common water levels in a manmade area is a sewer network. Sewers are often a hive of twisting and turning tunnels that can and will induce claustrophobia on innocent victims. While it might set the mood, it makes a true nightmare out of adjusting your view to see what is around you and the repeated tiles along the walls make it even easier to get lost in the maze.

No, Not That Button! That Button! Only After That Button!

I’m sure many people find it funny how one of the games perpetrated as the best video games of all times also has one of the levels that strikes true fear into any gamer’s heart. There could likely be an article on the Water Temple, but it wasn’t that bad. I’ve played worse, at least.

Yet, Ocarina of Time’s most dastardly dungeon did have a huge pitfall in the form of a rising and falling water puzzle. In order to scale the dungeon, you had to switch the water level between low, medium, and high, but it wasn’t that simple. In order to get to medium from high, you first had to switch it to low, and then traverse half the dungeon to get it to medium. There was one spot for each water level and they were out of the way and could only be reached when the water was in one other level.

Combined with the need to constantly switch on and off the Iron Boots, the Water Temple is the perfect example of a tedious water level puzzle. However, there are times when such a puzzle is taken to the exact opposite extreme of being far too simple. In Pokémon Platinum, the Pastoria City Gym has a water rise-and-fall puzzle, but this time it completely lacks challenge.

In this scenario, you need to raise and lower the water to lift up floating bridges so you can cross paths. This time, there are several buttons to bring the water to different points and all of them work at any time (unless the water is currently at that level, of course!). The thing is though, you follow the path and right before you need a bridge, there’s the button you need. And when you get to the next point? There’s another button! There is no choice, no problem solving, and no difficulty. I’d accept this sort of thing as a tutorial to later puzzles, but the entire challenge is this simple. When a “puzzle” is this ridiculously easy in the middle of the game, it makes you wonder why it was there at all. It was almost as simple as just stepping up to the Gym Leader and saying hello, just it only made more work for the programmers.

There’s Other Fish in the Sea

While there are countless examples of bad design there are several that shine through to be heralded as one of the few good water-based levels.

One of the downsides for Super Mario 64 was the water levels, which suffered many of the problems stated earlier on. However, by the time you get to Super Mario Galaxy, the underwater levels become a breeze due to slightly refined controls, but especially due to the addition of holding onto Koopa shells underwater. The shells take care of the movement and give you a nice speed under the water, and the only controls you really need are steering. While it isn’t a perfect solution, the shell submarines are leaps and bounds over the slow and troublesome swimming in the previous games.

While not an improvement to the specific mechanics that had problems in the earlier games, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker deserves a mention here. After everyone got over the shock of the cel-shaded graphics, they got a new shock as they heard the game took place on a giant ocean. However, the ocean wasn’t just a giant blob of blue. You could see several islands away no matter where you were and the Tower of the Gods served as a prominent landmark no matter where you were. Some of the travel times were long, but the way was paved with various small ships, monster outposts, and even a small mini-game to jump over barrels. The travel time, coupled with the day and night cycle, honestly made the game seem really realistic in the right ways, giving you the feeling of being on an epic journey.

Earlier I mentioned the monotony of a sewer pipe’s decorations and the utter confusion caused by the layout, but the game Batman Arkham Asylum definitely did sewers right with Killer Croc’s lair and the surrounding area. While the lair is a little sparse in detail, the tension is set just right by the layout and the element of surprise from the big bad villain. While intentionally a maze, you are gifted a great hint to the layout in the form of Batman’s radio sensors, which honestly seem to work better than a map in such a sprawling maze. The area directly outside the lair is the only ‘true’ sewer pipe you have to visit in this game, and given that it’s a single line, it definitely doesn’t threaten you with getting lost, yet due to several broken floor panels, it isn’t a single line to navigate and thus achieving a great balance.

In closing…

Many games and gamers have had terrible experiences in the water, but that should not have us shy away from the water completely. Much like a child learning to swim, as the gaming industry grows older, we find better ways to go about the water levels and eventually learn what works and what doesn’t. Still, many players will hold a grudge against the accursed water-based zones for a long time and for good reason. Some game developers have directly mentioned player’s concerns when it comes to the water, and they have certainly proved they are working on solutions.

~B