E3 Special II - "I Got Your Open World For You Right Here!!"

A bit of a follow up to this week’s earlier E3 post (“I got your backwards compatibility right here!”), I’ve been following the big announcements from E3 to see if there was anything that remotely made me excited for video games again. On the whole, it’s just been shooty-shooty-shooty.

There was the surprising announcement that Microsoft were launching a new Xbox360 and were dedicated to supporting the console for the next twelve months. Lots of new games coming out for it, but it’s really just putting off the inevitable – when the 360 has become a thing of the past and all my old games are redundant. Microsoft were not doing themselves any favours with their comments about the 360 being their product for people who don’t want to be connected to the internet all of the time, and Sony’s potential library of back catalogue being available may give us some hope that older games are going to be available to keep in some form or another (though probably not).

But on the whole, besides a couple of interesting exceptions to the rule, the whole of E3 was about carrying a gun, and shooting someone. Or carrying a sword and stabbing them. Or maybe just punching them in the face.

I’m not the only one bored by it all. 

Variety reported an interesting panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where the biggest names in cinema – George Lucas and Steven Spielberg – discussed the future of movies and video games. Lucas said, “the games industry can and will create empathic characters, but it hasn’t so far because it’s been driven by hard-core gamers who enjoy onscreen violence.”

I’ll come back to that panel in a future blog post to discuss Lucas’ theory of entertainment taking to controlling your dreams.

However, in amongst all of the bloodshed, shooting, fast cars and the inevitable zombie plagues, there was one phrase that kept being repeated over and over again.

Open World Environment.

They’re taking it to mean that you can go anywhere, and do anything you like. 

The first one I really remember being like this was Grand Theft Auto, though (in my opinion) this was truly perfected in Red Dead Redemption. But let’s stick to GTA shall we? 

GTA IV - Gorgeous looking isn't it?

Before I start, let’s just get this clear – I LOVE GTA. GTA IV, and Red Dead Redemption are possibly my favourite video games ever. Sure, you could say they’re the usual men-shooting-each-other games, but certainly in Red Dead’s case, the shooting was done reluctantly, and there was an emotional plot that would but many blockbuster movies to shame. 

Grand Theft Auto IV is another work of genius. The “open world environment” is huge, the whole of Liberty City (though this is tiny compared to the open plains of Red Dead). Once the plot had opened up all of the islands of Liberty City, you could drive around everywhere. Get in a boat and go out in the sea, or take a helicopter around the city. Fantastic. You could do lots of cool and crazy stuff, like jump out of helicopters, drive cars off of rooftops or through the subway system, or just take in the sights. Go to the bar, have a few drinks. Go to the golf driving range, play darts, or just cause mayhem and wait for the police to take you down.

Seems pretty open world doesn’t it?

Let's look at this...

It’s an image of the game, looking at a borough of Liberty City. Fantastic isn’t it? The detail, the size of it all. 

However, can you go in the buildings? Well, you can, but only a select few. You can go into the shops, the bars, the houses that you own, and ones that are either locations of prearranged action scenes and missions, or the houses of the filthy crims you’re working for. But that's it. The rest are just blocks that have graphic images of fake windows and doors.

Suddenly, your open world isn’t quite so open.

You can drive into the airport, but you can’t book a flight on a plane. You can steal a helicopter, but you can’t leave Liberty City. You can hijack a boat, but you can’t sail off into the sunset. 

Your open world is a snowglobe, filled with fake plastic buildings with fake doors that don’t open.

This is not a criticism against Rockstar Games. As I’ve said, I love GTA, I love them all with a passion, and I still play GTA IV now, many years after it came out. I can’t wait for GTAV, though I get the feeling that I’m going to be rubbish at it (because, as I discuss elsewhere on this blog, I’m bad at video games). No, this is the limitation of the console, of the computing power, and what it can do.

My wife is brilliant. I’m not just saying it because she’s my wife, but she has this knack – this ability to think outside of the box. She loves video games too – she plays a lot more than I do. She’s actually finished Assassin’s Creed (all of them), the new Tomb Raider, and all of the Halo games (I still haven't finished 4 yet). But while she’s playing video games, you can see the frustration there. She doesn’t want to run into the next area to start shooting at the next wave of pre-destined goons. She wants to have a look around, see the scenery, look for any little areas she may have missed, look for secret passageways, and find the cool stuff.

This may come from the first couple of Tomb Raider games where you could take your time, find new ways around, find secret areas and investigate. But this seems to be lost with modern games and their “run in blasting and don’t look at the surroundings” mentality.

If she was playing GTA, she’d be off wondering why she couldn’t go into the neighbour’s building, go into that shop, climb to that roof… all of the things you can’t do. 

In order to be able to go into every house, to leave the city, to talk to random people, to go off on new adventures that are spontaneous you'd need a computer the size of a college dorm, or to get into MMORPGs.

But you know what does have a truly open world environment?

Tabletop roleplaying games.

Yes, we’re back to that argument again. Want to go into the neighbour’s house? No problem. Talk to the neighbours and ask if there have been any strange happenings recently? Maybe the neighbours have been having a problem being hassled by a cruel and manipulative landlord in an unexpected plot that the gamemaster is making up on the spot. A plot that’ll lead to a whole new adventure going off on a tangent that’ll last weeks. Who knows?

That’s one of the wonders of tabletop gaming. No limitations. Sure, the GM may have put a lot of work into an adventure or setting, but the option is certainly there for the player characters to do something different, leave the area, and find something new to discover.

Not only is wifey brilliant at questioning the logic of games (not only video games, but also roleplaying games – certainly keeps me on my toes when game designing) but she’s great at doing the unexpected. I remember we’d been playing Kult quite intensely, and I’d just purchased the epic and gorgeously designed Judas Grail adventure for it. I set the game up, tweak a couple of the characters so it fits with our current storyline, and start the game… only to have her lead the entire group to a completely different location, and end up in a nightclub full of vampires. 

But it didn't matter. The game was still awesome, and everything that came out of it was just as unexpected and cool for me as the GM as it was for the players. And that's something video games cannot do. At least not yet. Not for a long while.

Speaking of game designing though, I should get back to that. WILD isn’t going to write itself.

Until next time, stay multi-classy.

E3 Special: "I Got Your Backwards Compatibility Right Here!"

It’s E3 again this week, and this has to be the first year when I really don’t care what they announce. As I started covering in my “Bad at Games” features, I used to love video games. There was a time when I did little else except watch little pixels fly about the screen. My childhood was filled with video games, playing in my little room, headphones on, listening to music because the bleeps of the game didn’t really matter - well, they certainly didn't when you had a ZX Spectrum. 

All that changed over the last couple of years when I realised what I was doing. The big releases were all the same – run into a room, shoot everything, move onto the next room. The only thing I found interesting to play was Rock Band, and that time has passed for most of the world.

Then along comes the new console releases from the big-boys – the Playstation 4, and the XBox One. And you know what? I don’t really care at all. New hardware that isn’t compatible with anything I have – what a great idea. All those games I’ve kept because I love them – GTAIV, Red Dead Redemption, and even Halo. Can’t play them on the new console thanks to a new operating system.

And the hardware I’ve bought. Rock Band guitars, drums, microphones, drum-stools, mic-stands – every incarnation of Rock Band… The Kinect sensor, the Lips mics, the Scene It buzzers… all hunks of useless plastic when the new XBox comes out. They’ll all be worth about £2.50 when you try to trade them in as well, because no one will want them. The hardcore shoot-em-up gamer will have bought the new consoles without thinking and they’ll have no need for these peripherals anyway.

So I guess I’ve been well and truly XBoned. 

Backwards Compatibility

You know what IS backwards compatible though?

This…

Okay, so there are always new versions of games coming out. The market leader of the roleplaying game hobby is previewing its Fifth Edition at GenCon this year. But still, five editions (well, more than that if you count revisions an 0.5’s) in forty years is pretty good. The other biggies like Vampire has revised once or twice (if you count the recent nWoD update), and sometimes game systems change altogether – I’m one of the biggest culprits of this both in my GMing and professionally (after all, I was behind the massive change to the game system of Conspiracy X, stripping out the old game system and plugging in Unisystem). 

But you know what? You’re not forced into the changes. Because the game’s operating system is the most powerful one on the planet – your brain. If you were a hardcore Conspiracy X player and didn’t like Unisystem, but wanted the updates to the setting – you buy the new books and keep playing with the old system. Nothing is stopping you. 

You want to play D&D but prefer 1^st Edition to 4^th, but quite like the adventures and the settings of the newer games? You keep using 1^st Edition rules, and with a little tweaking by the Dungeon Master, the new information can be plugged right in. 

Campaign Length

One of the regular gripes about roleplaying games is the price. It’s an odd one, really when you think about it. Let’s look at a couple of examples (and excuse the UK pricing).

The core set for the 11^th Doctor edition of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is £39.99. Sure, that’s a lot, but it’s the same price as BattleCall of Halo 4. Let’s look at one of the heavy hitters of the games industry of the last few months – Bioshock Infinite. There main game itself takes around 10-15 hours to complete, so that’s already double most of the shooters out there (your average Halo / Call of Duty campaign is around 6-8). And then what?

GTA Multiplayer lobby.
To quote Nine Inch Nails - "Where is everybody?"

It’s kinda over. Most of the shooters have the online multiplayer that’ll give you hours and hours of the same rooms, and repetitive gunfire, or watching the screen while you wait to respawn if you’re as good at FPSs as I am. And if you find a game that you really love, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world may give up on it and leave you behind. My favourite multiplayer video game? Grand Theft Auto IV, especially GTA Race. Sure people still play it now, but I have to sit in a lobby for ten-twenty minutes until the few people around the globe who still play the game decide to log on. 

Once that wait becomes too much, or if they retire multiplayer servers for that game, it’s over. You can play the campaign again, but the villains appear at the same moments, you know what’s coming and it’s all a bit linear.

Tabletop gaming however, going back to the Doctor Who core set, you’re given a main adventure to get you going that’ll take about three or four sessions to play (so you’re looking around 9-12 hours for the basic adventure). Then you have a couple of smaller adventures that you can run, or expand into something bigger. There’s 6-12 hours there on top. And in addition to of all that, there’s a host of little story ideas that you can turn into adventures that’ll last you another… oh, I dunno… you could run a 4-6 hour game a week and still have a year’s worth of gaming there. 

Then, when you run out, you can just make up your own! Go onto one of the many fan sites and download some free adventures, and you don’t need to buy anything else!

You can stop playing for a year, put it on the shelf, and if you fancy a game with some friends, you can dust the game off and play any time you like. The servers for it aren’t going to be shut down from lack of use. You won’t have to go onto a new system or download countless updates. You can just play.

On that subject…

Downloadable Content.

DLC seems to be a big part of the video games industry. The big companies have realised that you don’t need to give everything to the gamer in one package. You can hold some of it back and release it for more money later.

Sure, this happens in RPGs too, but in most cases the additional material is being held back purely because of the cost of producing the game. Imagine if Doctor Who was all in one game – every possible creature from 50 years of Doctor Who… the game would be massive. And cost so much that you wouldn’t want to buy it. Or be able to carry it...

It’s another thing when video games companies put the content on the disk and just not let you access it until you’ve coughed up some extra cash. That’s just not on.

Anyway, back to the point. If you want to download a new map for Call of Duty, that’s fine. It adds a bit more multiplayer. In some cases, there are expansions to the single player campaign – and in some rare cases this expansion is huge and fantastic (I’m looking at you GTAIV – Lost and the Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony showing you how DLC should be done).

The same can be done with tabletop RPGs. Expansions, with new rules and settings are common, as well as extensive campaigns and adventures. But you know what’s controversial? You don’t have to buy the expansion for the game you’re playing.

I know, it’s a surreal concept. But imagine you’re playing World of Darkness and fancy something a bit different. You could buy a Call of Cthulhu supplement, or adventure, and run that with it with just a few system tweaks. I own many supplements for games that I don’t have the core set for. It’s a bit like downloading a map pack for Halo and being able to use them in Call of Duty.

Radical, huh?

Anyway, the first big seminars from E3 are about to start, and I'll be watching - hoping to be surprised. I'm not saying roleplaying games are better than video games, or vice versa. But when you're frustrated by the new announcements from E3 or from the new console launches, just remember tabletop gaming. It gets your brain working, it's social without just being a mass of insults on headsets, and it survives the tests of time.

Until next time, stay multiclassy!