written by Blain Newport on Thursday, July 9, 2009
Fallout 3 has provided me with a nice respite from the daily blog. I can easily crank out a few posts a day retelling the stories from the game. And that's what I did. In the intervening time, I've played enough that I could have filled up tons of blog entries. But that would get boring (if it hasn't already). I will select only stories I deem worthy for your subsequent enjoyment.
I played through The Club. The premise (of the gameplay) has nothing to do with style, as I originally thought. It's more of a race to keep killing (or shooting special targets) fast enough to keep your score multiplier up. At least that's hot it works on Casual difficulty, where you rarely have to worry about dying. At points I was thinking I'd like to go back and try the harder difficulties.
But the game really isn't worth it. The main problem is that it's almost always a point A to point B affair. Run to the next area, keeping your multiplier alive. Then shoot everyone. Then do it again. The problem is that the navigation signs are easy to miss while trying to shoot guys. And even though I was only playing on Casual, sometimes scoring over a million points when my goals were less than fifty thousand, I still felt like a failure every time my multiplier ran out.
Navigating didn't have to be a problem, either. They deliberately made the cues small and of varying types. Sometimes it's a sign on the wall. Sometimes it's chalk on the ground. Sometimes it's nothing and you just go vaguely forward and hope it's not a mistake. They could have put a solid line on the ground that would have made it unmistakable. But they wanted to force me to play the level multiple times and hone my performance. In some games, that's good because the act of performing is joyful.
But in this game, where I'm always frantically looking for something to shoot, it's just stressful. Worse than that, the AI often takes cover or outright runs away when I need to kill them to get my points. That takes control of my performance out of my hands and puts it up to seemingly random AI choices. Sometimes I just don't see anyone to shoot for a while and can't tell if my multiplier was supposed to take a dive in that section, if I was supposed to have seen a target to shoot and didn't, or if the AI that was supposed to attack me decided to hang back. It doesn't feel like a game I can win without large amounts of luck.
But at least Casual difficulty set the bar so low I didn't have to rely on that luck. With the exception of one round where I died (the first round in the game, no less), I never took less than first place. I meant to bring this up in my discussion of Stranglehold, but didn't, so I'll say it here. If you can't make your gameplay solid, at least make it easy so it doesn't get in the way of the player succeeding. Stranglehold has a lot of movement hang-ups where it's easy to have the character do something I didn't want him to do. But because I played on Casual, it never made the difference between life and death. If I had lost a level of The Club because an AI ran off or I got lost because of poorly placed navigational markers, I would have hated the game. It didn't make a huge positive impression. But it also never gave me cause to hate it and was pretty and let me shoot stuff.
3 of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment